


Some Hearts Are Ghosts

by honey_wheeler



Series: Somewhere Beyond the Bitter End [2]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Adultery, Alternate Canon, Angst, F/M, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Older Woman/Younger Man
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-10
Updated: 2012-12-31
Packaged: 2017-11-09 13:17:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 47,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/455862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honey_wheeler/pseuds/honey_wheeler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You were fathered by a bear,” Maege said to Dacey then, tucking Rhella into the crook of her arm expertly, “and now your daughter has been fathered by a wolf.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Every Mile is Two in Winter

She is the picture of her father. There is little of Dacey in her, at least not in her looks, none of Dacey’s dark coloring or long features. Even among the motley Bear Islanders, Rhella stands out, with her hair the russet of fall leaves and her eyes the blue of the morning sky. Few here care much for parentage, with little fuss made over bastardy, but still Dacey can see the looks some of them exchange when they see her with Rhella. They’d fought with the Young Wolf, they’d known that Dacey left his camp amid whispers and secret tensions, and now they look at Rhella and see her father and it is just something Dacey has to ignore. Her girl has been hard won and cautious looks have never hurt anyone. That's what Dacey tells herself, and most days she believes it.

It had not been the homecoming she’d imagined when she returned. She’d been very nearly huge when she boarded the ship for home, her belly sticking out before her and pulling her weight forward, so that she had to lean back to balance herself. Thankfully the ill-temper of her stomach had stopped long before she started her journey, but needing to make water every hour on a pitching ship had been more than a little aggravation. Worse than that, her emotions had no longer been her own. She’d thought that knowing she was doing the right thing would make it pain her heart less. She’d thought she would miss him, but that it would be fond and softly sad, filled with memories of their time together and regret for the future they couldn’t take for themselves; she hadn’t expected it to be a living, constant pain in her chest, a wretched creature that sank claws into her heart and closed her throat, making her frequent tears that first week an agony. Dacey had lost before – her father had left, as had Jorah and, most painfully, her uncle Jeor, she'd seen her family's fortunes dwindle, and she’d seen her mother off to battle with no sure promise of her return – but it hadn’t prepared her for what she felt at losing Robb. 

The piney scent of home had braced her when the ship docked at Bear Island. She’d stood on deck, looking out over the tree-covered hills, the morning mist hugging the ground like a lover. The air was cold and brisk in her lungs, almost sharp, and she’d gripped the rail with both hands, taking in deep gulps to saturate her blood with it, driving out any place other than home. Alysane and Lyanna were waiting for her on the dock, Lyanna waving and bouncing on her toes. It made Dacey smile. Lyanna had been just a babe when Eddard Stark had called his bannermen in the Greyjoy Rebellion, and Maege had marched off to war; Dacey had been more mother to Lyanna than sister. Now she carried another child in her belly, she’d raise a son or daughter of her own. As if sensing her thoughts, the babe had kicked. She’d soothed a palm over her stomach, felt the knots of heel and toes beneath the skin pulled taught. It wouldn’t be long, not long at all.

“Welcome home, Lady Mormont,” one of the deckhands had said, offering her a hand to help her down the gangplank, an offer she normally would have refused but was grateful for with the weight of the babe pitching her forward alarmingly on the incline.

“Thank you,” she’d told him, and it had been mostly true when she’d added, “it’s good to be home.”

Robb had sent raven after raven. She’d read his letters at first, with a sick compulsion, going over the words until she had them memorized though she never allowed herself to respond. Then it had become too painful, his questions after her and the babe had grown too desperate and plaintive. They’d worn away her strength until all she wanted was to catch the next ship back to the mainland, to sprout wings and fly there on her own. Alysane took the ravens after that, collecting the messages and not mentioning them to Dacey. What she did with the notes, Dacey didn’t know – kept them somewhere, threw them away, burned them. Dacey never allowed herself to ask. Time could only deaden the ache in her breast if she let the wound close, and she’d had more than herself to consider.

Rhella’s birth had been difficult. Dacey had heard stories on the mainland about days of birthing pains, screaming and agony, but the births of her own sisters had always been easy and fast – with Lyanna, her mother had given birth in the morning and been hunting in the afternoon – so Dacey had expected the same. It had been all Dacey could do to walk to the godswood that night and pray beneath the heart tree, let alone consider holding a bow to hunt. It had given her a queer sense of guilt, making her feel strangely less than a true Mormont. An irrational notion, surely. The Maester had warned of heavy feelings and thoughts following a birth, assuring her they were normal and would fade. Still, knowing that made little difference when such feelings and thoughts were churning through her, troubling her sleep and making her heart heavier than it should have been with her lovely Rhella nestled in her arms. It had made her miss her mother keenly, and when Maege finally returned to Bear Island, bigger than life and smiling to welcome her granddaughter, Dacey was surprised at how glad she found herself. 

“You were fathered by a bear,” Maege said to Dacey then, tucking Rhella into the crook of her arm expertly, “and now your daughter has been fathered by a wolf.” There was laughter in her eyes, a ribbon of pride in her voice. Dacey had never intended to be so like Maege. It left her with feelings dense and complicated, a tangled skein she'd no idea how to unravel.

Rhella is not at all complicated, though, nor is loving her. She is bright and curious, examining the world around her from the start with critical assessment, seeing far too much for a creature so small and new. Her moods are as quick as the squalls that spring up in the sea, anger melting into joyful laughter in the blink of an eye. And she's quite the most stubborn creature Dacey has ever known. She will be trouble when she's older, Dacey knows, and the thought gladdens her heart. The world may find such a girl difficult and in need of taming, but here she'll be right at home. Dacey's daughter may be a wolf, but there is bear in her as well.

Maege has been home a handful of days already when she brings the sack of coins to Dacey. "From the King," she says, setting the sack on Dacey's writing desk, the coins making a metallic rattle. There must be close to a hundred of them, golden dragons if Dacey knows Robb as well as she thinks she does. Dacey stares at the sack, then looks up at her mother. From the look on Maege's face, she'd known Dacey would refuse the gift, but still she gently says, "We could use them."

“No,” Dacey says. “Mormonts take no charity.” It’s not entirely true. The Glovers have helped them for years; even before Jorah emptied their coffers to please an unpleasable wife, Galbart had sent surplus after the harvest, or men to help repair the keep when some part of it gave up and crumbled into dust and rubble. But this is not the same as that and Dacey will not let Robb pretend as though it is.

Maege nods and takes up the bag. It droops heavy from her hand, and Dacey knows there are dragons enough in it to fix every broken door, repair every damaged weapon, to replace the rotted logs in the palisade and rebuild the leaking roof over the western hall. But she’s not tempted to keep it even for a moment. Mormonts hold to what they have, and Dacey still has her pride.

“I’ll send it back with Lord Glover,” Maege says. She stops before Dacey, drops a hand to stroke over Rhella’s cheek where she suckles at Dacey’s breast, a feat that had taken Dacey longer to manage than she’d have liked and one that still pains her sometimes. Each time Rhella's latch makes Dacey wince, she thinks of the woman carved on their gate, serene of face with a babe on her breast and an axe in her hand, and though she still loves that carving, she cannot help but think it more of a lie now than she used to. Maege strokes the same hand over Dacey’s hair and there is a world of understanding in the touch, to balance the counsel of her words. “We can only afford to be impractical for so long, cub, and you know that as well as I. Don't let him change you into someone else.” The words sting for all they're gently said. They sting all the more for that they ring true.

It is Maege who brings her the raven with the announcement one evening, after Dacey has fed Rhella before the fire. The King in the North has a son and heir, a healthy boy named Edwyn. Dacey says nothing upon reading the missive. Her mother looks at her with clear, steady eyes. She'd brought news of Rhella's birth to Robb, Dacey knows, bearing Alysane's letter to him and congratulating him on fatherhood. This seems a cruel perversion of the task. Dacey thinks she'll speak, perhaps to offer empty words or what small comfort she could think to give. But Maege only lays a gentle hand on Dacey's head, holding it there for several long moments before hoisting Rhella into her arms and closing the door behind them, Rhella's sweet babble over Maege's deeper words fading down the hall until Dacey hears nothing but the crackle of the fire, the rustle of the parchment in fingers that suddenly shake. She stares at the message until her eyes fill and the words blur and swim. The edges of the parchment curl and blacken when she throws it into the fire. She watches as it crumples, until it's nothing but black flakes and ash. 

Life goes on; life always does. Rhella begins to crawl, moving with such astonishing speed that Dacey often must sprint to catch her. She wryly tells her mother that she's considering a lead, and Maege laughs, telling her it's retribution for Dacey's own habit of attempting to crawl down the stairs given the slightest opportunity. Dacey smiles over her daughter's growth and frowns over her family's ledgers and tries her best to be happy. It's not perfect, but for now it is enough.

Jon Snow comes to Bear Island on the morning tide, not quite three moons before Rhella’s name day. Even though she’d had the raven warning of his arrival weeks ago, Dacey is still somehow surprised to see him in her home. It’s been years since she saw him last, when he was still barely more than a boy in Winterfell, only months before he’d gone to the Wall and she to war; she and her mother had attended a feast there – a wedding celebration for someone whose name Dacey can no longer remember – and she’d gotten far too drunk on spirits and ended up half-naked with Jon in an abandoned tower somewhere. She’d been the first girl he ever touched, she thinks. It’s something she hasn’t thought about in years, but seeing him again brings it all flooding back like it was yesterday. She wonders if Jon has thought of her since. She wonders if he’d ever told Robb. She wonders if Robb would be wroth to know, if his jealousy would be stirred at the thought of Dacey kissing another. She wonders if he even thinks of her still, or if he thinks only of his new wife. That thought opens a scab still tender and fresh, one only worsened at the sight of Jon’s direwolf, not at all like Grey Wind, but still too familiar, so she pushes it aside, but still it gnaws at her, making her tense and sharp when she greets Jon. 

“Lady Mormont,” he says, not quite bending a knee but dipping low in respect.

“Lord Snow,” she says in reply, inclining her head, struggling to keep her face a blank mask. If he speaks of Robb, if he says even one word of him, she’ll break into a thousand pieces, she knows she will.

“I am here on Ro-”

“No,” she stops him, slashing her hand sideways. He swallows his words, watches her with wary eyes. She steps closer, wanting no one to hear, closer than is truly proper, but then this is Bear Island, it is her home, and here is one place she can care little for propriety. “No talk of him,” she says, low and clipped. “I swear it, if you speak of him I will push you off the dock and into the ocean myself.”

She does not know what reaction she expects, but it is not for him to laugh. “As you wish, my Lady,” he says, and the tension goes out of her body in a rush so that she thinks she might sag to her knees without his quick hand at her elbow.

“Thank you,” she murmurs, and it is not only for his hand in support that she thanks him for.

He is as kind and solicitous as anyone could wish for as they ride to the keep with Ghost loping alongside, asking after Rhella and saying he looks forward to meeting her, brushing aside Dacey's apology that she has no finer mount to offer him. She nudges her horse ahead, leads him through the palisade into the yard, the canter of the horses' hooves echoing thin and hollow. He looks about him as he dismounts, his sharp eyes missing nothing. Suddenly Dacey is aware of the bone-deep shabbiness of the keep, seeing through his unaccustomed eyes all the things so familiar she no longer notices them: the broken cobbles and patched walls, the oaken doors rubbed so smooth they shine in spots, the gates that hang just crooked on their hinges. All the things worn with age, but used despite their disrepair. She pulls herself up straight, feeling defensive and proud, but there is no pity in his eyes.

"Lord Snow," she says, gesturing him into the great hall.

"Jon," he corrects immediately, almost sharply, his voice gentling quickly to add, "please." 

"Then you must call me Dacey," she says, and he smiles his agreement, though something tells her it may take more than one request for him to use her given name. Lordship is an unfamiliar mantle for him still, she can tell; it sits uneasy on his shoulders, like an ill-fitting garment. 

"I would pay my respects to your mother, if I could?" he says.

Maege spends little time in the great hall, always complaining that it's too large for normal use, filled with drafts and echoes and requiring too much running back and forth. She is in her solar when Dacey brings Jon to her, a wolfhound at her side, one that had always seemed enormous to Dacey until she'd seen Grey Wind. The hound jumps to its feet now, bristling at Ghost's approach, and they make a careful investigation of one another, sniffing and cringing and crouching until Ghost's dominance is firmly established and Dacey feels Jon relax beside her.

"Mother," Dacey says. "Lord Snow would like to speak with you." Even as she speaks, Jon is stepping forward and laying his sword across the scarred wood of Maege's desk, though his hand lingers on the carved pommel before he steps away. The pommel is different, a snarling wolf’s head rather than the bear she remembers, but Dacey recognizes the rest of it as her uncle's sword and the sword of their House, Longclaw, the Valyrian blade a mark of pride to the Mormonts.

"This belongs to your House, my lady."

"Does it?" Maege asks mildly. "Then how did you come to have it."

"I..." Jon falters, confused, and glances to Dacey. She shrugs, curious to see how he'll play this. "Your brother gifted it to me."

"Generous gift," Maege says. "Yet you would return it." Jon squares his shoulders and sets his jaw, pride combining with uncertainty to make his spine rigid.

"It belongs to your House."

"Are you not of our House?" Maege presses. "You hold our sword."

"My lady-"

"My brother does not give such gifts lightly, young Jon Snow. You would do well not to take them lightly either." She is teasing him now, though he clearly doesn't know it. Dacey can't blame him; her mother can seem a fearsome thing at first, and her jokes can sound much the same as her threats.

"I wouldn't," he protests earnestly, "I didn't, it's-"

"For pity's sake, mother, stop toying with him," Dacey says wryly. Maege makes a moue of impatience, dismissing Dacey for a spoilsport. "Jon," Dacey says, turning to address him. "Pick up the sword, it's yours."

"But I-" Jon attempts, but Maege waves an impatient hand at him.

"Don't be a ninny, Jon, pick it up," Maege says. Dacey sees Jon's lips twitch in surprised amusement at the insult, and she can barely keep from laughing herself. Only a Mormont would treat the Hand of a King so, she thinks, and the thought fills her with fierce pride. Slowly, he moves forward and retrieves Longclaw, curling protective hands about its scabbard.

“Thank you, my lady.”

“Maege,” her mother corrects him, in a tone that brooks no argument. Jon nods.

“Thank you, Maege.” He turns to Dacey, hesitating a moment before he speaks. “And thank you…Dacey.” There’s something shy in the way he says her given name, and it makes her smile.

He finds her again that evening, when she's rocking Rhella in her chair before the fire, her daughter’s sweet breath fanning her throat. Ghost approaches first, padding into the room with none of the regard for courtesy or propriety that a man might show. Dacey smiles and lets him snuffle at Rhella's feet and back, his nose burrowing at the back of her skull to make Rhella stir and wriggle in her sleep. He makes a whuffing sound that Dacey takes for approval and looks back to Jon still lingering in the doorway before he moves to the hearth and settles before the fire, his head resting on his forepaws and his eyes glittering scarlet as they take in everything. It pleases Dacey that he's taken to her as quickly as Grey Wind did, maybe even more so, acting as if her presence is so familiar as to be customary. Maybe it's fancy, but she thinks the bond the Stark boys have with their wolves is more than just that of a master with a pet, that there's some connection between them. Grey Wind always seemed to show Robb's moods and thoughts, his inner feelings. If Ghost is comfortable with her, then so must Jon be.

"Will you loiter on my threshold all evening?" Dacey calls to Jon, and he grins sheepishly, moving into the room with an air of apology.

"I'm interrupting," he says, gesturing to Rhella fast asleep against her chest.

"No, please," Dacey tells him. "I'd like the company." He sits in the chair opposite her, leans forward with his elbows on his knees to examine his unmet niece.

"You make a pretty picture, the two of you." There is nothing improper or lascivious in it, only appreciation. It makes Dacey smile. She's become so accustomed to wariness when people look upon her with Rhella, to their knowing glances at her daughter's coloring and obvious parentage. They are never rude, but neither are they unconcerned, knowing as they do that she is the unacknowledged bastard daughter of their King who was born amid rumor and whisper. It's nice to be looked upon so uncritically.

"I used to feed her here when she was on the teat," she says. "She got spoiled, now she wants to be rocked whenever I have time for it."

“ _You_ fed her?” Jon says, seeming a bit embarrassed at discussing such a thing, though his words don’t falter. "I'd have thought you would have used a wet nurse." Dacey gives him a wry grin, adjusting Rhella in her arms.

"You're not on the mainland anymore, Jon. We do things a bit differently here."

"I can see that,” he says with an answering grin. “It's fascinating so far. Different than any part of the North I've seen.”

“We pride ourselves on that.”

Jon leans forward to look at Rhella more closely. She’s beginning to lose the chubbiness of her infancy, turning into a collection of rangy limbs and untidy hair and freckles. He catches one foot in a gentle hand, and Dacey is struck by the tenderness on his face. Rhella is his niece, but he still doesn’t know her and noblemen aren’t always in the habit of knowing even their own children, let alone any others besides. But Jon looks upon Rhella as if he already loves her, and maybe it’s just her mother’s heart, but Dacey knows in that moment that Jon Snow is a man that she can trust. 

"She looks just like him," Jon says, quietly, so that Dacey can barely hear him. He looks up, catches her eye and makes an apologetic shrug. "Edwyn doesn't, not at all. Rhella is like Robb and Sansa combined."

"And how is your sister?" Jon’s face knits into unhappiness at the question. Dacey remembers the criss-cross of scars that had marred Sansa’s back the one time Dacey had seen it, she remembers how Sansa shied away from even the most casual touch and from all men besides her brothers.

“She is recovering,” Jon says. “Or as close to it as anyone could expect, I suppose. She no longer wishes to marry.”

“No one could blame her,” Dacey says, and Jon gives her a grateful look; she imagines the topic of Sansa marrying is one both frequent and contentious in Winterfell. She wonders what Robb thinks on the matter, whether he would see Sansa married despite her wishes. Dacey would like to say she knows he wouldn’t, but it’s Robb Stark she would say that of. The King in the North, however…his position is less certain.

“She was always so sweet and open,” Jon says, “and now she’s closed up like a flower.” It truly pains him, Dacey can see. She remembers the girl who'd done little more than sit and stare at first, her flat eyes fixed on something a world away. She can't imagine how much harder it would be to see Sansa such a way if Sansa were her sister, if she could remember her happy and laughing and sweet.

"And Arya?" Jon’s face brightens at the mention of his youngest sister, a grin sparkling in his eyes.

"Wild as ever. She would love it here with your family." 

Dacey has to agree. She’d spent little time with Arya, but it only took a little time with Arya to know Jon’s words to be true. "She and Lyanna would be thick as thieves, no doubt."

“She’d turn into a wild wolf here, running about and terrorizing the whole island.” There’s no mistaking the fondness in his voice, the affection writ plain in his soft smile.

"You clearly care a great deal for her,” Dacey says.

"She's a stubborn little hellcat," he laughs. "I'm partial to that sort."

"Then you've come to the right place."

That soft smile is still on his face when he looks at Dacey, giving her the same fondness he has for his little sister by proxy. "It seems that I have,” he says.

He comes to talk to her each night after that. They speak in hushed voices if Rhella is asleep, though more and more she's awake, eager to see Jon, though she cannot quite manage his name and calls him "Jaw," asking for him and "Woof," whenever they're not there. Ghost is endlessly patient with her, never flinching at the clutch of her hands, lying quiescent as she clambers over him and throws both skinny arms around his neck to practically throttle him in an embrace. She's no less fond of Jon, clamoring to be on his lap as much as she's on Dacey's, babbling animatedly while he answers as if she's perfectly intelligible, as if they're two adults having a conversation. It makes Dacey's heart ache to watch them together. Mormont women have always done quite well without men, but there is no denying how Rhella blossoms in Jon's presence, how deep her attachment to him grows. Dacey's glad of her daughter having such a man in her life, for Jon is impossibly kind and gentle, treating Rhella the way Dacey imagines he treated Arya when she was small. But it also fills her with dread at how Rhella will miss him when he leaves, as he inevitably must. It makes her think that this is how it could have been with Robb, if she’d allowed him to forsake his vows, if she’d run away with him when he asked her. She’s never doubted the rightness of her choice, but that can be little consolation.

They never speak of Robb when Jon visits her. She'd forbidden him on his arrival, and he's kept to his word. But he's clever, and he finds ways to speak around Robb if not directly of him, building all the pieces around him until Robb could only fit in the empty space left behind. So she learns of him even as they don't speak of him, learns of his son and his family, of his efforts at ruling the North independently. She learns of him and she aches at the life he has that holds no room for her or their daughter.

Not all of Jon’s visit is evening chats and play with Rhella, though; all through the day, he works beside them, fits neatly into all of their lives as if he is truly a Mormont by birth rather than by circumstance. He trains in the yard with them, sparring with Jorelle and Alysane, asking Dacey to teach him in the use of her morningstar. He sits with her and Maege to listen as they hear grievances, rides out to visit the towns and villages around them. He works alongside Maege as if he’s a common laborer rather than Hand of the King, repairing defenses and shoring up perimeters, even once patching a wall with grout until Dacey comes to find him and tells him to leave off.

He was to stay for one moon. One moon to see Rhella, to check on her and Dacey and make sure they were well, and then return to Winterfell to report back to Robb. His raven had said so, and Jon says it as well, each time Maege invites him to stay as long as he likes, or mentions Rhella’s upcoming nameday feast. One moon, he says, but one moon turns into two, and then three. Rhella begins to push herself up to her feet. She takes lurching steps clinging to Jon's steadying hands, walks unaided for the first time from his hold into Dacey's waiting, outstretched arms, and still he stays.

“I couldn’t leave before Rhella’s nameday,” she says with a sheepish shrug when Dacey pointedly mentions the turn of the moon that will come the next night. She smiles at him, impulsively reaches out to grab his hand in hers and squeeze.

“I’m glad you’re staying,” she says, feeling strangely shy. “As is Rhella. You’ve been-” She clamps her teeth together over her words when she realizes what she’d been about to say, _you’ve been like a father to her._ It’s nothing less than the truth, but saying it would reopen wounds that are still not entirely closed. Putting such a thing to words might be like tugging a stray end of thread and having the cloth it’s part of unravel entirely. Jon looks at her with a mix of curiosity and wariness, and a soft compassion that makes her think he knows what she would have said. “You’ve been wonderful with her,” she finishes instead, and he smiles gently enough to make her throat close alarmingly.

“She’s easy to be wonderful with.” He squeezes her hand in return.

Rhella spends the whole of her nameday feast in his lap, babbling excitedly at the liveliness and the clamor, clapping with the music and dropping choice bits of meat to Ghost where he lies under the table, waiting expectantly. They’re not nearly as choice as Dacey would have hoped – nothing is quite as choice as Dacey would have hoped, and the meagerness of the feast makes her feel proud and almost bitter all at once.

“Dacey?” Jon asks her, holding a bottle of wine over her empty cup. She nods, but then smiles ruefully as he pours first into her glass and then into his own. 

“It’s not Dornish red,” she notes wryly.

“It’s a fine feast, Dacey,” Jon says quietly, leaning towards her and keeping his words low. “You’ve nothing to feel poorly about.” She should have known that he would intuit her thoughts. He has an uncanny ability to guess what she’s thinking, one that’s as reassuring as it is discomfiting at times.

“Bear Island is not what it once was,” she says, lifting her glass to drain it and motioning for him to fill it again.

“Your mother told me of Jorah and Lynesse,” he says. “You must have hated her.” Dacey shakes her head, the wine making her a bit dizzy.

“It’s hard to hate someone who was so unhappy,” she says. “Jorah never should have brought her here.”

“Hard to take back such a mistake,” he says gently, and it’s nothing that she hasn’t thought before. About Jorah, about Robb, about herself.

“I hate him, sometimes,” she whispers. “I hate him as much as I miss him.” She’s not sure who she speaks of now, whether she means Jorah or Robb. It’s the wine loosening her tongue, the wine and Jon’s quiet acceptance, her certainty that nothing she could say to him would make him think worse of her. That there’s nothing she could say to him that he wouldn’t understand.

“It’s difficult when someone deserves both your anger and your love,” he says. From his tone, she knows that he is just as unsure if she speaks of Jorah or Robb, but that he's struggled with the same feelings she grapples with now and feels only empathy for her, no matter which of them is on her mind.

“Enough,” she says, gathering herself and shaking off the spell of self-pity. “This is hardly the proper talk for a nameday. Come, my girl, let’s have a dance.” She lifts Rhella out of Jon’s arms and carries her to the floor, holding her and spinning about, until Rhella is laughing and dizzy and clutching so tightly at Dacey’s neck that Dacey hopes for just a moment that Rhella will never grow up, that she will always be this sweet, laughing little girl who needs her more than anyone in the world. She hopes that Rhella will know happiness and joy and love, that she will never feel the sting of loneliness or the pain of abandonment. It’s a hope that’s short-lived; Dacey knows that Rhella will soon feel both of those things when Jon leaves, that she will not understand why he must go. Maege had never told Dacey this, that you couldn’t truly protect your children from the things that would hurt them most.

They are in her solar one evening, Jon sitting with Rhella on his lap, when he tells Dacey he’ll be leaving soon. Rhella is paying him no attention. She's focused on her attempt to coax Ghost into jumping up there with her, an invitation Ghost sensibly declines. She seems oblivious to the words being said, to what they mean.

“He’ll be worried,” Jon says regretfully, and his words are genuine, heartfelt enough that Dacey thinks were it not for Robb, Jon might just stay and never leave. It’s the first they’ve truly spoken of Robb since Jon arrived, and it feels almost dangerous, so Dacey only nods and tries not to let her feelings show on her face.

Rhella sits Jon’s shoulders as they walk to the docks on the day of his departure, her small hands fisted in his dark curls, his own hands looped protectively over her ankles. The sun is in his eyes to make him squint, so bright that Dacey shades her own eyes with one hand, but he keeps both on her daughter's ankles to hold her tight. It makes such a happy, domestic picture that all of a sudden Dacey is seized by an urge to ask him to stay. She has grown accustomed to his easy presence, to his friendship. She has grown accustomed to her daughter having a father of sorts. But she bites her tongue.

Ghost lopes ahead of them, his white fur limned yellow in the sunlight. When they reach the ship, Jon hooks his hands under Rhella’s arms and hoists her off his shoulders, cuddling her to him in an enveloping hug that Dacey envies for a moment. It reminds her of her Uncle Jeor leaving when she was just a girl. Rhella does not want to stay in Dacey’s arms when Jon puts her there, reaching for him and squirming so that Dacey has to hold tight.

“Goodbye, sweet girl,” he says fondly, ruffling Rhella’s curls so like Robb’s.

"Jaw," she says. "Go play?"

"No, Ellie," he tells her, genuine regret in his voice. "We've no time to play. I'm afraid I have to leave you."

"Play," Rhella insists stubbornly, then when Jon still doesn't scoop her away from Dacey, she turns plaintive, asking, "Jaw and Woof, play?" Jon doesn't answer, only presses a kiss to the top of her head, surprising Dacey with the emotion in it.

"Dacey," he says, turning to her with sad eyes. "Take care of yourself." She nods, then looks down in confusion when he presses something into her hand, a small purse that she can feel holds more coin than Bear Island has had in its coffers for years.

"No," she says instantly, anger flaring in her chest, more strongly than it should, more strongly than she truly understands. "We take no alms." He ignores her struggle to pull away, closing her fingers over the purse firmly enough to be uncomfortable.

"I am of this House, remember?" he says, a soft smile on his face, tinged with sadness. "This is my payment for Longclaw. And my gift to your Uncle who worries." Reluctantly, Dacey nods and relaxes, allowing him to give her the purse. She can see by his face that he won't allow her to refuse. And Maege had been right; they can only afford to be impractical for long. Jon smiles and after a moment's hesitation, leans forward to press a soft kiss to her cheek before turning to board his ship for home.

The keep seems empty without him. Rhella misses him keenly, at first searching for him as if they're playing one of their games, as if he's hidden in a cupboard or behind a stair, waiting for her to discover him. She searches equally in vain for Ghost, calling plaintively for her Woof as she wanders about, saving the best bits of her supper for an animal that no longer lies beneath her chair in anticipation of a treat, until Dacey has to rebuke her for wasting good food, of which they have little enough. It's enough to break her heart. Dacey knows all too well the pain of losing someone after growing accustomed to his presence.

Life has only just gone back to normal when the raven bearing a summons comes. This is no letter from Robb Stark to a woman he’d once loved, but an order from a King to his subject, and it hurts Dacey’s heart even as it angers her that he would use such power against her, knowing that she would have no choice but to come.

She has never been apart from Rhella before. It had somehow never occurred to her that she ever might be, though logically she’d known such a thing to be true. Maege laughs, telling Dacey that she’ll get used to it, that someday she might even like the time to herself, but Dacey hears the sympathy in her voice, feels the compassionate weight of her mother’s hand on her hair. All through the journey, Dacey thinks of Rhella. She’s never been prone to worry, and Rhella is in more than capable hands with Maege and Alysane looking to her, but still she frets at first, wondering if Rhella is able to sleep, or if she’s upset at Dacey’s absence. Or worse, if she’s not.

The buzzing starts from the moment Dacey arrives in Winterfell. These are the men she fought with, the men she might have died with. But they don’t see that in her now; they see only the woman who left Robb’s camp amid whispers and rumors, the woman they’ve heard even now has an auburn-haired wolf-daughter on Bear Island. Dacey hates it, she hates them, and she hates Robb for bringing her here to such a thing. But still she dresses for her audience with the King carefully, donning her finest gown and braiding her hair carefully, even smudging kohl around her eyes. They will see her as a lady, no matter what else they think.

Seeing him is a sweet shock, like jumping into an icy pond. For a moment, she can’t breathe, can’t move, can do nothing but stare at him with all the love and longing that she still feels, no matter how she tries to bury it. But the buzzing is still there, even worse now, and she shakes such foolishness away, stiffens her spine and stands as proud as a daughter of Bear Island should. Her eyes go to his lady wife despite herself. She's a pretty woman, Roslin Frey – Stark, Dacey reminds herself, she is Roslin Stark now – and Dacey can see the anxiety in her eyes at Dacey's presence, the defensive hostility. Dacey feels a brief surge of pity that's chased away when her eyes flicker downward and she takes in the thickness at Lady Stark's middle, the high-waisted gown obviously chosen to accommodate a pregnancy that must be at least four moons gone. Ice forms around Dacey's heart instantly, though it shouldn't. There's no good reason for her to be surprised that Robb has gotten another babe on his wife. This is his duty. It is the duty she herself pushed him towards. And yet such sensible thoughts are only cold comfort.

She can feel Robb’s eyes on her; they bring the memory of his hands, the shade of his touch on her body feeling almost real. When he asks after Rhella – though he carefully does not use his daughter’s name – Dacey realizes with sudden clarity what his purpose was in calling her here to Winterfell. He’d thought she would bring Rhella. He’d wanted to see his daughter. Although she struggles to hold her anger, the knowledge makes Dacey soften, at least a bit. She could never fault him for wanting to know his daughter, no matter how poorly he goes about it.

His hand is hot and insistent on her elbow when he whisks her rudely away from Sansa after dismissing everyone who’d gathered. Dacey means to keep herself cool towards him, to act as a subject rather than a lover, but the soft desperation on his face slips beneath her armor like a well-aimed sword, and when he tells her he missed her, she cannot lie to him, cannot say she didn’t miss him as well, cannot deny his kiss.

It is as hot and sweet and perfect as it’s ever been; he backs her into the door, presses the long line of his body to hers and opens his mouth wide for her tongue. She could fuck him right there, could let him put his mouth on the breasts he’s bared to his hands and push him down to the floor to take his cock with both of them still dressed, she could and she _wants_ to, so very desperately that it brings her back to herself in one sharp instant, so that she pushes him away, speaks more harshly than she’d imagined she could. But she does not regret the sharpness of her words, does not regret leaving him there alone. He may be King, but she is no King’s whore.

It is Jon who tells her she’s to be sent away. She’s not even been there a handful of days and already she’s being pushed out, after over a week’s journey to come. The laugh that escapes her is bitter and angry. Jon watches her with soft eyes, only compassion in them.

“I’m sorry, Dacey,” he says.

“Sent away,” she laughs. “Sent away! I’d not wanted to be here in the first place.”

“I asked him not to send for you,” Jon tells her, his tone begging her forgiveness though there is nothing to forgive. “He wanted to know Rhella. He wanted her here with him.” Dacey’s anger seems to leave her in a rush. She moves to the chair at the hearth and sinks into it, absently scratching at Ghost’s chin when he comes to lay his head in her lap for comfort.

“And that’s the one thing I can’t fault him for,” she says. “Forgive me Jon, I speak too freely.”

“You know there’s nothing you can’t say to me, Dacey.”

“On Bear Island, perhaps,” she answers, “but we are no longer on Bear Island.” It’s painful, this reminder that there is only one place for Rhella now, that the rest of Westeros is nothing like Dacey’s beloved home and never will be. “I find myself wearier than I have been in years.”

“I’ll leave you,” Jon says, and Dacey nods. “I would have Ghost stay with you, though. If you like.” The beast looks up at her at Jon’s words, looking queerly understanding, like Jon’s kindness travels through him as well.

“Yes,” she says, stroking over Ghost’s head. “I would like that.”

They say their goodbyes in the godswood the next morning. Her bitterness had turned to sadness over the long night, a night that stayed sleepless for all her weariness, despite the soothing warmth of Ghost’s form beside her. She is leaving Robb again, and leaving him badly. It is not what she’d ever wanted, and it is no fault of his, nor hers, nor anyone’s. It’s only how life is. 

It is not his pleas for her to stay that break her heart, nor his plea for her to bring Rhella so he can know her. It is the doll he hands her as a gift for Rhella that does it, cracking her heart neatly in two. Rhella would have no interest in such a gift, unless it was to pop its head off and see what’s inside. But Robb doesn't know that. Robb doesn't know _her_ , and Dacey fiercely wants him to. It is for her daughter that she tells him Bear Island is beautiful in spring. It is for Rhella that she says, “A king should know all of his kingdom, don't you think?” 

It is an invitation, it is an offer and a gift, and she offers it to him knowing that it’s changing all she believed she felt but not caring. She would have him know his daughter, and she would have Rhella know her father.

The look on his face is stunned and grateful. It’s enough to mend the heart the doll had broken. She thinks of that look on his face as she leaves Winterfell, forcing herself to look straight ahead on the Kingsroad and not back at him. She thinks of his face her whole journey home, until she sees his face in her daughter’s on her return, in Rhella’s smile, and Dacey lets hope spark in her breast that someday she’ll see both faces together, someday soon in spring.


	2. No Spring Skips Its Turn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bear Island is exploding into spring when the King in the North comes to pay visit.

Bear Island is exploding into spring when the King in the North comes to pay visit, flowers blooming in clouds of color and even the green of the leaves as brilliant as jewels in his honor. The wind that stirs the fur at Dacey's collar and pulls tendrils from her braid has lost the biting edge of winter; it's cool and fresh, and Dacey can see Grey Wind pacing on deck even before the ship is close enough for her to see Robb's face, the great wolf lifting his huge head to sniff at the wind that carries the unfamiliar scent of the land to him. She'd not seen him when she went to Winterfell. He'd been out ranging with Ghost, the two of them hunting and running and exploring their territory, and she'd missed him. It had made Robb seem even more a different person to see him without the wolf that had never left his side when Dacey was with him. It had made him seem even less hers. Dacey wonders if Grey Wind will still remembers her, if he'll recognize her scent or if it will be as unfamiliar to him as that of her home. If he'll come to her the way he once did, butting his head at her hip and demanding a scratch, as if they'd never been apart. As if she and Robb had never been apart.

She’d not truly believed Robb would come. It had been impulsive of both of them, rash and impractical, brought on by the desperate emotions as they said goodbye in the godswood of Winterfell. After she’d returned home, her senses had come back to her; she’d worked at squashing her hopes with a ruthlessness she normally reserved for foes in battle. And now he’s here and she can scarce believe it. She tells herself not to stare at Robb's face, willing it to come into focus, but that's just what she does, staring so hard her eyes water and grow blurry, until she blinks and suddenly his face is clear and growing closer, his half-smile beautiful and dear and heartrendingly tentative.

Grey Wind is first off the ship, not even waiting for the gangplank to be lowered; instead he jumps to the deck, landing with a great thump that shakes the planking even as far as Dacey's feet. Hardened sailors scatter at his approach, not frightened but apprehensive and cautious – sensibly so, probably, for though Grey Wind is dear to Dacey that does not make him any less powerful and fearsome. The instant Rhella spies him, she begins to squirm in Dacey's arms, pushing with her feet and wanting to be set down.

"Woof," she says, her voice laced with urgency and excitement and instruction. "Mama, Woof. Jaw and Woof are here."

"No, Rhella," Dacey tells her. "That isn't Ghost. It's Grey Wind and he doesn't know you yet, you have to let him get used to you before you can touch him."

"It's Woof," Rhella insists stubbornly, though she stops pushing and kicking, contenting herself with twisting in Dacey's arms to face the great beast moving towards them on silent feet. He is close enough for Rhella to see his grey coloring now, the darkness of his eyes so unlike Ghost's red ones, and her tone grows uncertain. "Woof?"

"Grey Wind," Dacey corrects again, and Rhella's face twists into disappointment.

Grey Wind shows only the slightest hesitation when he reaches Dacey, snuffling at her boots for a moment before pushing his massive head against her hip, almost hard enough to knock her down. There's relief in her laugh when she steps back to keep from falling over, and she scratches over his head with one hand, ducks her fingers down to get the spot on his jaw he likes best. He still knows her. Some part of Robb is still hers, however small.

Robb has disembarked the ship in a more conventional manner, but he moves just as quickly towards them, with just as much pointed urgency. It's a shock to see him here, on her island, in her home. She cannot decide if he looks foreign and strange here, or if he belongs. Perhaps both. She wants to run at him, to throw herself in his arms and kiss him like to climb inside him, but she forces herself to hold still, one hand fixed in Grey Wind's ruff to keep herself in place.

“Your Grace," she says when he stops before her, slightly out of breath, though not from exertion, she doesn't think. She feels short of breath herself, and she'd been standing still, only her heart racing and jumping.

“Dacey,” he says, his eyes roaming over her face as if to memorize it. “I…” He remembers himself then, pulls back the hand that was reaching for her cheek and drops it to take up her hand. “Thank you for hosting me.”

“Of course, Your Grace.”

“And this is…” His words dry up as he looks on his daughter for the first time, his mouth forming his daughter's name with no sound. There is wonder on his face, tangled with regret and love and uncertainty. It’s enough to break Dacey’s heart.

“Rhella,” Dacey prompts him, everything she feels in her voice.

“Rhella,” he echoes softly. “Hello.” Rhella regards him curiously, suspiciously, then turns to Dacey with a knit brow.

“No Jaw?” she asks, plaintively, and Dacey's heart drops to her heels.

“What is that, little one?” Robb asks, looking to Dacey for clarification. 

“Jon,” she says quietly, hating the strange guilt that steals through her. “She is looking for Jon.” Robb straightens with a jerk as if he’s been slapped. A cloud passes over his face for a moment before he forces it away, putting on a brighter expression like a mask. 

“Jon is back in Winterfell,” he says, half to Rhella and half to Dacey. “He has to run the Kingdom while I jaunt about on holiday, I’m afraid.” His smile is strained and pains her far more than anything concerning him rightly should anymore.

Dacey nods. She had not expected Jon to come – had not especially wanted him to, though she would have welcomed him and been glad to see him. But she had wanted Robb alone and to herself. Now she wishes Jon were here to ease this awful tension, to make things comfortable. Strange that he should be more familiar to her now, of the two of them.

There will be a welcome feast in the King's honor that night, one much larger than what was had for Rhella’s nameday. Bannermen are coming from all over the island and the nearby mainland, the Glovers and the Boles and the Forresters, Ned Wood and Benjicot Branch. The keep is as well-repaired as Dacey and Maege could manage, the wine is the best they could afford. Jon’s gift had helped. It seems fitting to Dacey that some of the dragons he’d pressed upon her should go to welcoming his brother, though Jon might not think it such a good use of funds.

Preparations keep her apart from Robb most of the afternoon, which is well enough. After missing him for so long, wanting nothing more than to be near him, now that he’s here she finds herself uncertain and wrong-footed, having little idea what to say or how to feel. But still she dresses carefully for the feast, in the same gown he’d seen her wear in Winterfell, laced even more tightly; she’d had Lyra pull the laces until she could barely breathe. The way his eyes travel over her when she greets him in the great hall makes breathing seem incidental.

All through the feast, she feels him at her side, though they don’t touch at all. Every sense she has is attuned to him, to the sound of his voice as he makes polite conversation with Robett Glover next to him, to the warmth of his body that she can feel from shoulder to knee, to the smell of him, sharp and musky in her nose and at the back of her tongue. He is entirely proper the whole time, and when he’s made not even the slightest overture towards her by the third course, she feels disappointment spreading in her chest. It makes her angry at herself, and she drinks more wine than is well-advised, prods listlessly at her food in a way that Rhella would not be allowed.

“Terrible to have no taste for the feast you provided,” Robb notes beside her. He’s left off his discussion with Robett and has turned to her. His face is far more placid than Dacey is used to; once there was a time she could read him plain like a book.

“I did not provide the feast for myself,” she tells him with a small smile, “otherwise I would have chosen simpler fare.” He laughs a bit, gives her a rueful smile, as if apologizing for all the work his visit has meant for her. Just when she’s decided that he came only for Rhella, that he intends to keep apart from her, he drops one hand beneath the table and touches the skirts of her gown, rolling the cloth between his fingertips. She sucks in her breath sharply at the touch, bare as it is, her body coming instantly alive.

“I thought you misliked wearing skirts,” he says, voice pitched low enough that only she can hear him, and the sound of it crackles through her, makes her feel like she's standing in a lightning storm with electricity sparking on her skin and hair.

“I do.”

“Perhaps I may help you remove them later,” he says, his eyes full of promise, full of the memory of their time together, full of need and desire and love, and she looses the breath she hadn't known she was holding. Everything is different between them, but nothing has changed, and the relief of it is as keen as pain. A hammering sets up in her ribs. Her mouth is dry when he tries to speak, so that she must swallow and lick her lips, the words sounding rusty and unused when she says, "Gods, yes, please," barely recognizing her own voice. 

Her words work on him instantly. His eyes expand into glittering blackness, his lips part and his nostrils flare as if he's a stallion scenting a mare. The hand he rests on the table shakes for a bare moment, and she realizes that he’d been just as unsure of her feelings as she’d been of his. It’s a small piece of the hesitant boy she’d once known and it works on her as devastatingly as the hand on her skirts that fists and then begins to pull, dragging the cloth up her shin and over her knee bit by bit, the pull of it a caress on skin suddenly too sensitive by half. He's only just gotten the hem to his hand, he's only just run roughened fingertips over the bare skin above her hose, when music is struck up and a dance is called for. Regretfully, he pulls away, the retreat of his hand another caress that has Dacey biting back a groan of frustration, and she watches as he's pulled into a lively dance by her mother. Lord Glover urges Dacey into a dance as well, and as he guides her around the floor, Dacey feels the pull of Robb across it, feels herself tugged towards him like the metal shavings that cling to a honed blade. But he is a King and she is the future Lady Mormont, and there are many partners and many dances before she finally finds herself in his arms, arms that she's longed for and dreamed of for too long.

He touches her only as much as would be proper for a dance, but there is nothing proper in the feel of his hand, the flex of his fingers on her hip. The intent and the desire in his hands weighs heavy on her skin, makes her feel dreamy and drugged. He watches her with an intensity bordering on frightening, his eyes filled with want. She thinks she must look at him much the same. He pulls her closer, leans in to whisper her name at her ear, his breath stirring the hair at her temple, but the song ends and another begins and they break apart to dance with others, though they probably fool no one, following each other with hot eyes as they do.

The end of the feast couldn’t come soon enough for Dacey. When the guests are finally gathering for goodbyes and leaving in clumps – for their homes, for their chambers in the keep, for rooms at the inn in town – Dacey is restless and jumpy, wanting nothing more than to chivvy them out of the hall, but knowing that she must play Lady Mormont and graciously bid the revelers farewell. They are most of them gone, finally, only a few remaining who will stay the night as guests when Dacey finds her way to Robb where he stands with Maege and the Glovers and Alysane.

“Dacey, join us for a cup of wine,” Lord Glover bids, hoisting the bottle towards her. Dacey hesitates, letting her eyes snag on Robb only for a moment before looking away to smile at Galbart. 

“Thank you, my lord, but I find myself quite weary. I think I’ll retire.” Alysane beside Galbart looks at her and understanding passes between them. Alysane makes a rueful face – she does not understand the draw Robb has on Dacey but they are sisters nonetheless, and sisters help each other – and turns to Galbart to distract him with bright conversation. Dacey bids them all good night, lingering a few moments on Robb, urging him to hear what she cannot say. She can feel his eyes burning into her back as she leaves.

Dacey’s chambers seem warm and smothering. It is only the heat of her own body, she knows, the flush of dancing and wine and the feel of Robb’s skin on hers. The way she paces the floor does little to help. Time moves tortuously slow and still he does not come, so that she wonders if he misread her. Or worse, if he’s reconsidered. If he plans to stay away from her and return home still faithful to his wife after all. Disappointed, bitterly laughing at herself, Dacey begins to yank at the ties of her gown, wanting only to be rid of the wretched, stifling material. She’s only just pulled it over her head and thrown it to the floor, resisting the urge to stomp childishly on the piled material, when a knock sounds at her door and makes her blood freeze.

He says nothing when she opens the door to him, offers no false premise for being here. She doesn’t need one. Her fingers hook easily in the laces of his jerkin and she pulls him inside and pushes the door shut behind him, the latch barely sounding before her mouth is on his.

“Dacey,” he says against her lips, “Dacey, gods, Dacey, how I’ve missed you.”

She’s missed him as well – she’s missed him more than she knew it was possible to miss a person – but she can’t say the words, cannot put voice to what she feels. Dacey has always been more open with her body than with her heart, and he’s taken so much of her heart already that she feels compelled to guard what little she has left, even from him. Especially from him. But her body betrays her even without the words. It tells him how she’s missed him, how she’s longed for him. It whispers it with the tremble of her fingers as she tugs at the laces of her jerkin to get to the skin beneath, with the way she jerks and sways at the feel of his tongue on her breast through her shift. It fairly shouts it with the wet heat already slicked over her inner thighs when he works his hand up under her shift and down into her smallclothes to find her cunt.

“Gods, Dacey,” he moans, “I swear I could smell you all night. I could barely see straight. I’ve no idea what Lord Glover said to me.” She wants to laugh, but his touch after so long has stolen every bit of breath she has. It’s been so very long. The withdrawal of his hand is its own caress when he lifts his fingers to her lips, paints her arousal over them. Her tongue darts out instinctively, and she tastes the tang of her own pleasure before his tongue covers hers, sliding rough and hot and licking her clean. He drags her shift over her head with little ceremony, making her hair crackle with static and stand out about her head in a wild halo. He returns his hand to curve inside her smallclothes, covering her entirely with his hand to rub and stroke and squeeze, two fingers hooked inside her where she’s already tightening with her release as if he’s been touching her for hours rather than moments.

“Yes,” he breathes, laughing, layering her skin with kisses and licks and sweet words, moving from neck to collarbones to the slope of her chest. “You come so sweetly for me, so quickly.” Her cheeks burn at that. It is not usual that she is the one desperate and eager and coming too fast, and she is unsure how much she likes this reversal. She has had no men since him, but she thinks even if she had, she would still feel this unraveled. But his voice wears away any reservation she has, it calls her like the sirens of legend that lurk in the sea past Bear Island, witches who lure sailors to dash themselves on jagged rocks in their desire to get closer. “Come for me again, sweetheart, I love your response to my touch, I’ve wanted it for so long.”

She expects him to continue touching her, or to guide her towards her bed so that he can fuck her, but instead he drops to his knees, looking up at her with dark, hot eyes, an urgent plea on his face. At her nod, the plea becomes need, but it is no less urgent. He presses his lips to her belly, over flesh more rounded now than it had been at his last touch, now that she’s carried Rhella within her. His fingers hook in the waist of her smallclothes, and she thinks he’ll pull them off, but he opens his mouth over them, sucking at her through the cloth. It is soaked through in seconds, from his tongue and her cunt, but still he does not drag them down, drawing on her through the linen until she’s so wracked by pleasure that she must reach behind her, searching for something to steady herself and finding nothing. Her hands find his hair instead, spearing through curls still roughened by salt spray from his voyage, gripping tightly as he finally strips her smallclothes off and puts his mouth on her. The touch of his tongue on her bare skin has her knees buckling instantly; she sinks down, slowed by his arms hooked through her legs and under her thighs, until he supports her weight entirely, hands steadying her hips. She grips his hair desperately, rocks into his face, her feet barely touching the floor even with her toes stretched.

He lasts longer than she’d thought him capable of, holding her in such a way, long enough that his tongue wrings a second release from her and sets about drawing her towards another. It’s only when his muscles shake from the strain that he eases her down, her toes touching the floor and then her knees, then hips and back and shoulders as he urges her backwards and follows to stretch atop her, kissing up her belly and chest, along her collarbones and jaw to find her mouth. He sucks at her lower lip as he’d sucked on her cunt moments before, then sinks his teeth into the fleshiest part to pull with exquisite care.

“I want to fuck you,” he murmurs, nipping and laving her lips, licking at the seam and entreating them to part for him. “I’ve wanted to fuck you for so long, for years, I miss being inside you.” Again, she wants to echo the words, but she can’t, she won’t. “Let me be inside you, Dacey,” he asks sweetly, “don’t turn me away.”

“I’ve not turned you away yet this night,” she says on a breathless laugh. “What makes you think I would start now? I am not a fool, Robb Stark.”

The slide of him inside her is achingly familiar, making it seem like the last time they lay together was hours ago rather than years. He feels just as she remembered but still somehow different. He is not as boyish as he once was, she realizes, his touches more skilled, his movements more sure. She refuses to allow herself to think on how it was lying with his wife that made them so. That has no place here tonight. No matter what he has done with his wife, he still looks on Dacey with awe and stunned desire, still touches her as if she can’t believe she’s real. His face is still soft and sweet and open. Still he is the boy she’d fallen in love with.

She finds her release a third time right there on the floor, his own following not long after, as he says her name with each thrust inside her until he stiffens and spends, spilling hot and sweet inside her the way she’s so missed. She holds him close, draws her knees up to her chest to flank his sides and doubles her arms around his head where it lies on her chest, his forehead damp and hot against her neck. Her cunt still pulses with the strength of her pleasure, fluttering around him inside her as his cock softens the way his muscles do, until he is limp and heavy atop her, as boneless as Rhella is when she falls asleep on Dacey’s chest. It makes her smile to consider. Like father, like daughter. A fierce joy bubbles up in her, filling her chest and her throat with more emotion than she knows how to handle. He is here. For now, he is hers. And for now, it is enough.

They barely sleep. There’s too much lost time to make up, too many secrets to rediscover. His mouth finds and re-learns every bit of her body, ever freckle and scar, every nook and crevice and knot of nerves. He grins slyly each time he hits a familiar spot, smiles in unadulterated happiness whenever he uncovers something new. The silvery marks on her belly and hips from carrying Rhella are traced with careful fingertips, then catalogued with his tongue, his nose a ticklish drag as he tastes the length of each mark where they tick in parallel from one hip to another. Her breasts are more sensitive than they’d ever been before and he spends at least an hour touching them and tasting them, reveling in her shivers and whimpers, smiling in triumph each time she cries out and arches up to his tongue. He tastes her cunt again, and then later again, coming back to bury his face sweetly between her thighs, unable to get enough of her. And always he fucks her, pushes his cock inside her like he’s coming home, over and over and over until she’s sore and raw but still wants more.

She doesn’t remember falling asleep close to dawn, but she must have, because she finds herself waking to bliss, peaking hard even as her eyes flutter open in the lemony light of morning. Robb is propped on his elbow, watching her with the smug expression of a cat, his fingers just barely moving inside her while pleasure ebbs through her like the tide.

“Good morrow,” she says on an appreciative sigh. He chuckles, leans in to kiss her temple, her ear, the hinge of her jaw.

“Couldn’t just leave you asleep,” he murmurs into her jaw. “Not without touching you once more before I steal back to my room.” He kisses her soft and sweet, kisses her long enough that her cunt aches again and she wiggles her hips, wordlessly encouraging his hand to move and give her another release, encouragement he takes happily. Too soon, he slides away from her; it’s at her own behest, he can’t be found here if Rhella comes in early the way she so often does, but still it rankles. She was not made for such secrecy.

Matters of house and keep have her occupied enough for the morning, though they can’t stop her from thinking on him, on his touch and his kiss and his cock. More than once she trails off, staring at nothing until someone calls her name or touches her elbow to regain her attention. It’s a relief when finally she’s done and can seek him out.

“His Grace asked for a place to swim,” the steward says when she asks with what she hopes is a casual tone. “He is at the pond in the godswood.”

“He took no guard?” He came with only two, men Dacey had never met before, and so far they’d spent their time drinking wine and flirting with Dacey’s sisters, Robb having waved them off. Dacey was once his guard, after all, he’d said, and he’d always be safe with her and Grey Wind flanking his sides. His trust is touching, as is his continued faith in her despite their years apart, his absolute willingness to entrust his life to her over any of his men. It is a mark of the kind of man he is and always will be.

“No,” the steward tells her, “only the direwolf.”

Dacey stays about the keep for a bit longer, busying herself with meaningless tasks. Part of it is that she does not wish to appear to be running about after him like a silly-headed girl. Another part is that she’s unsure now in the light of day. For all that they’d been completely consumed with each other during the night, once Robb was in his own chambers and she was seeing to the daily business of the keep she'd wondered if that was only fleeting, an itch to scratch and an ache to satisfy. She’s never had to worry about boundaries before, never had to think on what might be welcome. There had been no walls between them before, no wife back home, only a faceless, nameless woman too abstract to consider real.

Grey Wind is curled on the bank when she reaches the pond, Robb nowhere in sight. At first Dacey wonders if Robb is even here, but then she draws closer and sees the ripples on the water, bubbles of air filtering up to pop on the surface.

“Is he drowning himself?” she asks Grey Wind, smiling when he looks up with a friendly whine, his tail thumping on the loamy soil. She sinks to sit cross-legged beside him, and he shifts his head immediately to her lap, rumbling contentedly at her firm scratching. They sit together for a few moments, Grey Wind’s weight solid and reassuring at her side, until Robb bursts out of the water with a great splash, drops of water shining in the sun like cut glass. He spots her on the bank and grins, shaking water from his hair much as she’s seen the beast in her lap do, then cuts through the water towards her with strokes sure enough to do any Bear Islander proud. She’s about to call a greeting to him when he hauls himself up to plant one foot on the rock ledge of the bank and stands completely bare, water streaming from his body in sheets, and her mouth goes entirely dry. He’s beautiful. 

“He likes you as much as ever,” he says, jerking his chin at Grey Wind before snagging a length of linen from the ground and rubbing it briskly over his hair, completely unselfconscious at his nudity. There’s no trace left of the boy who’d touched no woman before Dacey, who’d stood uncertainly before her that first time, half eager and half shy as she coaxed him from his clothing. She suffers a pang of loss for that boy, even as she feels her body flare and melt at the man he’s become. Judging by the twitch of his lips and the quirk of his brow, her response hasn’t escaped him.

“Grey Wind,” he says, and the wolf’s ears prick, he lifts his head half off Dacey’s lap to look up at Robb. Robb gestures to the side with a nod of his head. “Keep watch.” Instantly, Grey Wind scrambles to his feet to prowl a loop around the pond, showering Dacey with dirt and twigs that she has to brush away.

“Keep watch for what?” she asks, feeling strangely reluctant to look back up at him once she’s cleared herself of debris. She’s never been one to shy away from a man’s body, so why his should fluster her so at the moment she doesn’t know.

“For people,” he says, stepping closer so that even downcast, her eyes fill with the stretch of his calves and thighs, his pale skin furred with dark auburn hair that swirls over muscle and bone. Small tufts of it dot his toes and she gives in to the strange urge she has to touch the patch on his big toe, feeling it coarse and wiry under her fingertip.

“You’re concerned with people being about?” she asks, stroking her fingertip up his instep, allowing herself to cuff her hand about his ankle. His own fingertip catches her chin and lifts her face to his, her gaze traveling up past knees and thighs, past his cock already sitting up hard against the auburn hair that grows even thicker and darker on his belly, past his ribs and chest to his look at his face, his eyes so hot that she catches her breath and can’t still her trembling.

“I’d rather not have an audience when I fuck you until you scream,” he says, and oh, her blood is afire at the words, she feels her cunt contract hungrily, as if she’s not had him for years again, rather than the hours it’s been. His mischievous grin does nothing to cool her. “Unless having an audience is something you would enjoy?”

“Shut up and get your cock in me,” she breathes, and his grin deepens, he smiles against her lips as he kisses her, until the reach of his tongue makes smiling impossible.

It’s as if a barrier has been breached. Any worry she’d had about boundaries evaporates like mist in sunlight; Robb shows no uncertainty, his kiss is as wild and untamed as it had been before he’d left her chambers in the light of dawn. Even less uncertain are his words. He bears her back to the ground, covering her clothed body with his naked one and saying all manner of filthy things, words so blisteringly hot that Dacey is surprised the trees around them don’t go up in flames.

“Can’t wait to get my cock in your sweet cunt again,” he breathes into her neck, licking and sucking at her pulse in time with the rocking of his hips, “it was all I thought of all morning, all I wanted, all I ever want. I dream of your cunt, Dacey, gods, I could cry at how good it feels to have you tight around my cock, so hungry for me, so greedy and wanting. Do you want me now, beautiful she-bear?”

“Yes,” she pants.

“Do you want my cock in your cunt?” he persists. “Are you hot and wet for me?” He nudges her knees apart with his own, and Dacey offers a mental thanks for the breeches she wears instead of skirts that allow him to settle into the cradle of her hips so intimately.

“Yesssss,” she hisses, canting her hips up, her fingers slipping on his wet skin as she clutches at his shoulders. He ruts against her, urging his hips into hers in a manner so lewd it steals her breath, the friction of her breeches maddening and perfect. He catches each knee over an elbow, plants his hands at her shoulders to force her knees back towards her chest and continues the motion of his hips, rocking square against her to make her whimper.

“Did you frig yourself and think of me while we were apart?” he asks, lips hot and wet over the shell of her ear. “Did you slip your fingers into your pretty little cunt and wish they were my cock, did you come crying out my name?” He gives her no time to answer, grinding into her and biting her earlobe, saying, “I fucked my hand and thought of you, every time, always I wished it was your cunt that held me and made me spend.”

“Robb,” she gasps, sliding her hands from his shoulders to wrap about his wrists, trying to brace herself and get more friction. “Robb, please.”

“I thought of your cunt endlessly, Dacey,” he moans, his hips moving erratically now, his muscles bunched and quivering. “Oh, my sweet girl, my beautiful girl. I thought of your lips and your teats and your voice, the curve of your neck and the sweetness of your breath. I thought of getting another child on you, gods, Dacey, I want to get my babe on you.”

Her peak comes upon her all at once, gripping her so tightly she thinks she might shatter. She’s saying his name over and over, practically sobbing it. Her fingers are disagreeable; she finds she can’t unwrap them when he rears back, and she still holds his wrists when he yanks at the laces of her breeches, snapping one clean through in his haste. His fingernails scrape her flesh as he wrenches them down still partly tied – there will be marks there tomorrow, she knows, red and furrowed – but she couldn’t begin to care, not when he’s working his fingers beneath the cloth to sink inside her even before he’s gotten her undressed. She helps him push the breeches down with one hand, keeping the other circling his wrist, guiding his hand. He works over her only as long as it takes for him to throw her breeches aside and kneel between her thighs, pushing his cock in alongside one finger to stretch her and make her spine tighten like a bowstring. The stretch only lasts a moment before he withdraws his finger to catch her knees with both hands again and draw them up, driving his cock into her, pushing her back into the soft earth and grunting her name in her ear with his release raggedly enough to sound pained. She comes in a blinding flash, answers him with a shout so strong it leaves her hoarse.

“Told you I’d fuck you ‘til you screamed,” he mumbles against her neck, sounding smug and sated, and she would strike him with her fist if she had the energy.

They clean up at the pond before they head back, Robb dunking his head again while she ties a crude knot to hold the lace of her breeches together until she can get back and change. She should be embarrassed at herself for not caring at the waste of a perfectly good leather cord, with the coffers as low as they are, but there’s no room for embarrassment, not here, not with him. His shirt clings wet to his shoulders as he picks his way along the path before her, going no further than half a dozen steps from the pond before he reaches back without looking and takes her hand in his. Their fingers twine together, damp and warm, and Dacey’s heart thunders more heavily than it had when he’d been fucking her, the grip of his hand far more intimate than his cock inside her.

Soon the keep looms into view. She wishes the pond were farther, wishes she didn’t have to relinquish his hand before they come into the sight of others. But the pond is not farther, and she does have to relinquish his hand. He seems to regret it as keenly as she, his fingers holding the tips of hers before reluctantly letting go. Her hand feels cold and empty when she drops it to her side. Seeming to sense her unhappiness, Grey Wind steps up between them, crowds them apart and noses under her hand so that it comes to rest on his back. Dacey grins, and looks to Robb. There’s a smile on his lips, but something heavier in his eyes, something sad and tired.

“Roslin never did take to him,” he says quietly, almost as if to himself. Dacey doesn’t know what she could say, the idea of it baffles her so. Grey Wind is a part of Robb, as inextricable as his soul. How his wife could reject such an integral part of him is inconceivable. “But then he never took to her either,” Robb admits ruefully, and the smile he gives Dacey might be the saddest thing she’s ever seen. Too much lies beneath his words, too many years and too much compromise, too many things unsaid about what could have been, or perhaps what _should_ have been. Nothing she could say would ever be right in the face of so much, so she says nothing, and when he twines his hand in Grey Wind’s fur beside hers, their littlest fingers just barely touching, she doesn’t move away.

He keeps his own chambers his entire visit, but he’s as well as moved into hers. Dacey keeps no maids; all those who serve the keep do so in the kitchens, in the stables and the yard. There is no one to see him steal into her room each night, nor avert their eyes upon finding him there at the morrow. At first, Dacey expects Rhella to come find her as she sometimes does. She wakes early expressly to have her and Robb both awake and dressed in anticipation of it, but Rhella does not come, and when Dacey goes looking she finds her with Alysane, playing with her cousins, thrilled at the great treat of uninterrupted time with them. It gives Dacey with a profound surge of gratitude for her sister, one all the more powerful given that she knows Alysane doesn’t fully understand Dacey’s feelings for Robb, thinks Dacey would be better served by finding another to love.

“Thank you, Aly,” she says quietly. “I know you don’t-” but Alysane waves her off with a dismissive hand.

“Just be glad Jorelle isn’t here to stand in judgment of you,” she says with a sly grin to make Dacey laugh.

The days go by too quickly. They cannot get enough of each other. Even during the war, when everything between them was new and novel, they did not have such a burning need for one another. Now their need is sharpened by distance, honed like a blade by the years between them. It slices through restraint and reservation like a heated knife through butter, leaving them constantly, desperately wanting and needy. Few places in the keep don’t see them clinging to each other, fucking as if each time is the last; they take each other against walls and on floors, in the kitchens late at night, in her solar first with her bent over her desk and then with her riding him atop it, quills and nibs pressing into her knees. When they’re almost caught in the stables, she takes him to swim off an isolated stretch of beach an hour’s ride from the keep, the cold salt water buoying them as he wraps his arms around her waist, pushes his face into the dip between her breasts to feel them against his cheeks and ears. They swim out to a wide flat rock, past the sandy stretch of beach, and they lie nude, the heat of the sun baked in to the rock warming their backs. Salt clings to his eyelashes when she rolls to kiss over his face, tiny kisses that she plants over every bit of his skin. He fists lazy hands in the length of her hair, closes his eyes and puts his smiling face up to the sun while she works over his neck and chest, teasing his nipples with tongue and teeth to make his hands clench tighter, soothing each scar with her kiss. She ignores his cock, hard and insistent against her, sticky heat brushing wet against her throat from his tip, ignores it even as he tilts his hips encouragingly, follows her movements like a shade. The scratch of her blunt nails down his thighs only makes him buck his hips more pleadingly, and finally she takes pity on him, licking and sucking at his cock like it’s fresh snow cream on the verge of melting. The wet sounds of her mouth are loud and obscene, even over the slap of the waves, and she loves them, loves how they remind her of the sound of him lapping at her cunt. It makes her want his mouth on her cunt now, and she twists around with him still in her mouth, walks her knees in an arc to throw one thigh over his face and sit back, his surprised and appreciative moan vibrating into her and making her squirm. 

“Never done that before,” he notes lazily, after she’s swallowed around his cock as it spilled, after she’s rocked back against his face and come with her back arched, head to the sky, and his tongue pushed deep inside her.

“Nor have I,” she pants, slumped at his side. “We’ve been missing out.”

They touch everywhere, every hour, and Dacey cannot imagine how she managed without him for so long. His hands are no longer so callused as they once were, now that he does not hold a sword in battle as regularly, but they are still rough and she loves the feel of them on her, loves the way they drag and catch on her softer skin. She loves the way he turns to her, at night and in the morning, seeking her out endlessly. She’d known having him here would be good, but she’d never realized how good. Or maybe she just wouldn’t let herself realize; admitting what she could have had with him would have made her days far too painful to bear. 

Rhella is the only dark spot. She is slow to warm to Robb, shying away from him and looking to Dacey for reassurance. Grey Wind has become her boon companion, but not Robb, and Dacey thinks on how Rhella adored Jon and would not accept being anywhere but his arms. Yet she has her own father here now, and she shrinks away. It bothers Robb intensely, though he gives no sign of it when Rhella is near, never pressing her or making her uncomfortable. But Dacey can see it in the downward twist of his mouth when Rhella ducks from him, the knit of his brow when Rhella asks for Jon.

“She does not know you,” Dacey tells him as they lie together at night, holding his head to her breast and drawing her fingers through the russet curls so like his daughter’s. He accepts her words but she can feel that it still gnaws at him. It doesn’t go away, no matter how she kisses him and wraps her legs around his hips. Their coupling is usually light and teasing, he smiles and laughs with her even as he fucks into her. But this night is different, he stays withdrawn and quiet, rocking against her almost desperately. She wonders if he thinks about getting another child on her. It’s been on her mind since the day he arrived, from the moment he came to her chambers and she was at last able to touch him again. She’s shocked by how much she wants to have another piece of him here with her, then another and another, until they add up to a whole and he stays here with her where she wishes he belonged.

“Show me your island,” he says, halfway into his visit, when they’ve finally fucked enough that they can manage longer than an hour without falling on each other. “I want to know the rest of your home.”

It is Rhella’s first spring; Dacey is keenly aware of it as they ride down the shoreline, skirting the harbor and heading up the windward side of the island where tongues of rocky ground jut out into the sea, turning each wave that hits them into white spray. Rhella has never been this far from the keep before. She takes in everything with bright eyes and curiosity, Robb doing much the same, the two of them learning Bear Island together, father and daughter. He asks question after question, what’s the name of this place, what sort of fish are in these waters, who lives here, what is this flower called?, putting voice to the curiosities that Rhella can still only show as she grabs at leaves and points all around her at everything new.

Even on this far side of the island, there are men who know Robb, men who fought alongside him and battled for the independence of the North. Dacey has known these men all her life. Robb knew them for barely more than a moment, but still he knows their names, asks after their lives and livelihoods, frowns at the damage they show him from raiders and reavers. He promises men and weapons, supplies to build up defenses.

“Have you any men to send?” Dacey asks once they’re alone.

“Not enough,” Robb admits. “But we’ll find some. Fear poisons the heart, I can’t ask my people to live like that.” It surprises Dacey, though it shouldn’t. She’d have expected him to care about their safety and their strength – Bear Island takes the brunt of Ironborn attacks and spares the rest of the North, after all – but his care for her people’s wellbeing means more to her than a thousand men or the weapons to arm them. This is the King she fought for, this is why she wouldn’t let the boy he was break his oath to run away with her. It fills her with pride to know her measure of him was true

They stop in an inn for the noonday meal, leaving with a covered basket filled with soft brown bread and apples and a chunk of the tangy goat cheese the area takes special pride in. Dacey guides them to a meadow, one her uncle used to take her to when they rode the Island, before he left for the Wall, and they sit to eat, Rhella sneaking Ghost bits of her food when she thinks Dacey doesn’t see.

“She’ll spoil him rotten,” Robb says.

“She already did Ghost,” Dacey says, smiling. “Bring any of the others here, she’ll likely spoil them too.” Robb’s grin falters at the mention of Ghost, and Dacey wonders if he’s still wounded that Rhella asked so persistently for Jon when he arrived. If he’s jealous that Jon met his daughter first, spent more time with her. Or with Dacey. The idea of him being jealous of Jon’s time with her makes her feel flushed and warm, like her skin is a size too small.

Grey Wind has lost any interest in more food. He rests his chin on his paws, ignores Rhella as she tugs at his ruff. Dacey starts to call Rhella down when she climbs up to sit astride the wolf’s back, but Robb shakes his head, says it’s all right. He looks at Grey Wind, makes some sound or gesture Dacey doesn’t catch, and the beast is standing up with Rhella on his back, much to her noisy delight. Robb reach out and hooks his hands under her arms, steadying her while Grey Wind walks as if he barely notices the child on his back, even when Rhella clutches artlessly at his ruff and makes her hands into small fists.

“Woof,” she says happily.

“No,” Robb laughs, “not Ghost. Grey Wind. Say Grey Wind, Rhella.”

“Woof,” she insists stubbornly, slanting him a mistrustful look, and he laughs again. 

“She’s tough, this one,” he says to Dacey. 

“That she is,” Dacey agrees, watching as Robb swoops Rhella up into the air, laughing in response to her high, startled giggle. _Is he like this with his sons?_ Dacey can’t help but wonder, _Is this what would be if he stayed?_ It’s too painful to consider overlong.

They leave the horses hobbled once they’ve finished their meal. The wood around them is sparse and good for walking, waves crashing unseen off to their side. They pick a path through the trees, Dacey watching Robb with Rhella ahead of her. Rhella is holding Robb’s hand as she walks, tugging him down with her as she stoops to collect rocks or shells or wildflowers. She holds each up for his inspection, then turns it over in her hand before deciding whether it is to be kept or discarded. That which she deems worth keeping is handed over to him for hold for her. Dacey can see the fragile hope on his face, and she’s nearly destroyed by the careful solemnity with which he takes each treasure from Rhella’s small hand. He glances up at Dacey once, gives her a delighted grin, and oh, it’s just unfair, it’s all so very unfair for all of them, for Robb and for Rhella, for Roslin and her sons, for all of them.

It’s hard to dwell on such unfairness when he’s here with them, though, all day and all evening and each morrow upon waking. Even the practice of nothing is worthwhile in his presence; sometimes they only sit together before the fire in her solar, saying no words at all. But she has little patience for too much of nothing, not when there’s so much she wants before he must leave again. Not to mention all the things they want to try together. It becomes a sort of game between them, each goading the other into more adventurous things.

“I’ve always wanted to fuck under Winterfell’s heart tree,” he says.

“We’ve quite a lovely heart tree here,” she says, suppressing a grin, and then they’re running hand in hand to the godswood like besotted children. He sits back against the trunk, pulls her down to his lap and fucks her under the milk-white branches, the blue of the sky shocking against the scarlet leaves when she tips her head back in shuddering pleasure.

“No one’s ever frigged me under the table during supper,” she tells him another day, and that he takes to with distinct enthusiasm, sliding his hand over or into her breeches at every meal, until she can’t even smell food without her cunt growing slick and her knees trembling. And he’s not content just to make her come at the table with his fingers; he pushes it further several nights later, leaning over to whisper into her ear that putting his face where his fingers are now is something he’s never done either, and he’s dropping beneath the table before she can stop him, wiggling down her already unlaced breeches to get his tongue on her cunt as best he can. It’s more frustrating than it is effective, and she wants nothing more than to push her breeches down entirely so she can spread her legs for the hot, welcome touch of his tongue. But then Rhella calls out from her seat with her cousins down the table, wonders where Robb has gone, and he pulls away from Dacey’s cunt with a regretful moan, clambering up from underneath the table with a tale of a lost fork, leaving Dacey wanting to scream with the ache burning like fire in her cunt. She makes him fuck her on all fours that night, once on the floor just inside the door and once more on the bed, her fingers fisting in the furs until her knuckles blanch white. She works her hips back to his hard, urgent thrusts, wanting him deep enough inside her that she could feel it in her throat and her fingertips. She collapses onto her stomach with her release, his body still moving within her as he follows her down to lie over her back, his feet hooking inside her ankles to spread her legs apart for the rough push of his cock, his teeth set at her neck like he’s claiming her for his mate.

“I’ve never been tied up,” he says the next night as he lies beside her. He says it mildly, conversationally, but his eyes gleam wicked and Dacey’s cunt heats just at his look. It amazes her how he can be so tender and sweet with Rhella during the day, yet become this person once day is gone, this person full of need and desire and positively filthy ideas. But then she shouldn't be surprised; she's full of ideas just as filthy.

“I’ve not tied anyone up,” she says thoughtfully, matching his mild tone. “But then none of them have ever wanted to get away from what I was doing to them.”

“That’s just cruel, to say such a thing,” he tells her, grinning, “to make me jealous.” Dacey arches an eyebrow at him and purses her lips. It is on the tip of her tongue to ask if Roslin would not be interested in tying him up, but she knows it’s a petty impulse – Roslin did not ask for this any more than Dacey did – so she tamps it down.

Robb is eager and nervous when she twines a length of linen about each wrist and tethers him to the bedstead, arms spread to either side. She considers tying his ankles as well, but decides against it. For now, at least. She kneels on the bed beside him, her knees sinking into the feather ticking, and only looks upon him for long moments, until a flush creeps from his ribs to his shoulders, pink next to the auburn of the hair scattered over his chest. He’s not near as thin as the boy she still remembers when she closes her eyes and thinks of him. It’s still a surprise to look upon him and see the man that he’s become, layered with scars and long muscles. Dacey hovers her hands over him, feeling the heat of his body, the light scratch of hair as it brushes her palms. Even though she doesn’t actually touch him, his breathing quickens and he watches her through half-lidded eyes. When she reaches for the laces of the breeches he still wears, his stomach jumps and she can see the tendons stand out in his arms where he strains against the linen tying him. She pulls down his breeches to his knees and frees his cock, already hard where it lies against his stomach. It twitches when she ghosts her hands over it, just barely skimming his hot skin.

“Doesn’t this make a pretty picture,” she chuckles.

“Dacey,” he groans.

“There’s something to this, you know,” she says, carefully running her fingernails over his belly and hips, along either side of his cock down to the inside of his thighs. He sucks his breath in on a hiss, arches up into her touch. “You’re entirely at my mercy,” she continues. “I can do whatever I wish to you. Whatever… I… wish…” She drags her hands around his cock again, careful not to touch it directly, then leans down to let her breath flow warm over the tip of it.

“Dacey!” he groans again, more urgency in his voice than before. “Stop teasing me, I command it." She laughs out loud at that, at his desperate grab for control even as his body responds helplessly to its lack.

“And if I disobey?” she asks with a smirk. Quickly, she draws her shift over her head, tossing it aside and watching how his eyes follow the movement of her breasts. Then she settles between his knees to stroke over his body again and again, everywhere but his cock, pushing her breasts into his thighs and letting her hair spill over his skin until he’s quivering and jerking and making primal sounds deep in his throat. She’s about to take him into her mouth, her tongue a heartbeat away from touching his cock, when a knock sounds at the door followed by Rhella’s plaintive call. Dacey pulls away instinctively and Robb makes a pained sound, his hips bucking up to follow her as she retreats. She swallows a chuckle, cups a hand over his hipbone to hold him to the bed.

“Rhella, sweetling, I’m busy,” she calls.

“Mama!” Rhella calls again, over the sound of Lyra shushing her, saying they’ll come back later. “Mama, what are you doing? Can I come in and do it too?” Robb lets out a bark of laughter at that. Dacey leans up and claps a hand over his mouth, fighting her own laugh.

“If she knows you’re in here as well, she’ll never go away,” she warns. “She won’t stop until the whole keep hears her demanding to be let in.” She ignores Robb’s tongue over her palm. The bite of his teeth at the fleshy heel of it is harder to ignore. Dacey shudders, sinking a bit closer, but then Rhella calls again, and the door rattles against the latch. Dacey sighs and straightens, knowing that when Rhella is determined, nothing will put her off.

“Dacey,” Robb hisses at her in a whisper, canting his hips towards her as she slips to the edge of the bed. “Dacey, don’t you dare leave me tied up here.” Dacey evades the hook of his ankle and slides from the bed, unable to keep the grin from her face.

“Oh, I’ll be right back,” she assures him. He’s pulling at the linen now, struggling against his restraints, desire mixed with disbelief on his face.

“Dacey!” She blithely pulls on her shift and a dressing gown and blows him a kiss as she reaches for the latch and slips out into the hall. It takes only a handful of minutes to pacify Rhella. Dacey scoops her up and carries her to the room she’s been sharing with Alysane’s oldest daughter, telling her they’ll go play at the beach tomorrow and planting noisy kisses on her cheeks and neck.

He’s as hard as ever when she comes back. His cock stands out at his belly, thick and flushed even against the red hair around it, and she thinks she could touch the merest finger to him and he would spill into the air helplessly. She shrugs out of her dressing gown and advances on him, pulling the hem of her shift up just enough to tease.

“Did you miss me?” she asks with a grin.

“I despise you,” he answers, rolling his head to stare at the ceiling with a look of agonized bliss on his face. Being tied up agrees with him, it seems.

“Oh, now, come,” she tuts, climbing atop the bed beside him and tugging her shift off as she goes. His eyes go immediately to the sway of her breasts and she leans closer, holding herself just out of his mouth’s reach. "Perhaps I could make it up to you."

"What would you suggest?" he asks, then gulps as she smoothes one hand up over the length of his cock, palming it against his belly and sliding over the tip, then on to his ribs and chest, all in one long movement. "Gods, Dacey, do that again, please." Smiling, deliberately misreading him, she strokes over his chest again, laughing in delight at his noise of frustration.

"You are a truly wretched woman," he says, his groan verging on a whine.

“Is that any way to speak to the only one who can untie you?” she whispers, letting her hand wander back down to stroke over him again, adding her other hand as well, pulling each thumb down from tip to base in a slow, soft drag that ends with her palms on his thighs. She repeats the motion, her hands on him delicate and caressing, touching him like something precious before she pulls away to touch his hips and thighs, teasing him mercilessly.

“I am your King,” he reminds her, a distinct pout to his lip, one that she can’t resist leaning forward to kiss away. He tries to follow her when she pulls back, straining towards her with his mouth only to be brought up short by the scarves binding him.

“You’re my hostage,” she corrects him. His face grows serious at that, a softness creeping into his eyes.

“No, never a hostage,” he says quietly. “You would never have to hold me if you wanted me to stay. You would only have to ask.”

It’s a curious thing, how such sweet words strike her heart like poison. He never could stay, no matter if she asked or not, and suddenly she resents him for putting the burden on her. He has always put the burden of his duty on her; it had been she who forbade him from abdicating, from breaking his oath to the Freys, she who left so that he might wed his betrothed. It had been she who refused to live in Wintertown as his whore, right under his wife’s nose. And now she has to say no, she has to refuse to allow herself to ask him to stay the way she so very badly wishes she could. She has to resist for the both of them. It’s an unfairness so keen that she can barely breathe from it. She can’t even look on him.

The linen ties give easily when she tugs on them, freeing his arms from the bedstead. He looks at her with sad, confused eyes, sits up to reach for her shoulder, saying her name with such regret in his voice that it should soften her frustration with him, but instead it only makes her more upset, until she finds she cannot even be in the same room with him, at least for a little while. She pulls away from his touch, not wanting his softness or his apologies. She is sick of apologies.

“I need some air,” she tells him as she slides from the bed. She finds a tunic and breeches and pulls them on, without smallclothes or a shift, wanting only to get away as quickly as she can, needing something to pick apart the tangle of her thoughts. He doesn't try to stop her. She's not completely sure whether that's a relief or only another thing to resent.

It’s an exaggeration to say it puts a pall over things, but there’s a definite strain. Only once does he speak of it. The next night he comes to her room, hesitant in a way he hasn't been since he arrived, standing behind her and hovering a hand over her shoulder blade, so close that she could swear she feels his touch like a brand, even through the space between them. 

"I'm sorry," he says quietly. "We have so little time left and I've ruined it."

"You've ruined nothing," she answers just as quietly, feeling as if every nerve in her body is in that handspan at her shoulder, waiting for his touch. He waits for her to speak, to elaborate, and she waits for it as well, willing herself to tell him of the knot of feelings in her breast, but words refuse to come – she can face a hundred men in battle and feel no fear, but she's too afraid to tell a man she loves the truth of her heart – and after a long while his hand settles heavy on her back and she leans into it, into him, and neither mentions it again. But still it lingers between them, leaving their touches subdued, with little of the joy and adventure they’d held before. Now Robb holds her so close he can barely move and only rocks within her, his head on her breast as she holds him equally close.

They’re never more than an arm’s reach away from each other in the days leading up to his departure. Robb finds a thousand ways to touch Dacey that would seem nothing less than friendly and proper to anyone who sees, but that Dacey knows are nothing of the sort. He slides wanting, possessive hands over her at any opportunity, sneaks hot kisses when Rhella is occupied. Dacey feels equally wanting, equally possessive. Each time they’re alone, she reaches for him, no matter that she grows raw and too sensitive. He reaches for her just the same, holds her to him even when an errant touch makes him flinch and hiss. And always his face is sad and haunted.

Rhella seems to sense that something is amiss. She permits him to hold her on his lap for a half hour at a time when normally she would fidget away after only moments. The sight of him holding her daughter – his daughter, _theirs_ – is as painful as it is sweet. It makes Dacey's body feel too small for everything she feels. When the night is upon them and Rhella is tucked safe in bed with Grey Wind at her feet, Robb and Dacey fall on each other as if starving for it, despite their raw skin and sensitive flesh, despite sore muscles and heavy hearts.

“The days will seem longer than a lifetime when you’re gone,” Dacey says one night as she lies against him, drawing her fingertip through the bristly hair scattered over his chest, feeling the line of his collarbone under her cheek. His own fingers brush idly from her elbow to her shoulder. It’s rare for her to speak of such things, to worry about the future when the present gives her worry enough.

“What will you do without me?” he asks, clearly trying for lightness to chase away the resigned sadness between them. 

“Get some sleep for once,” she says, and he gives a sharp bark of laughter, tightening his arm around her.

“And after you catch up on sleep,” he says. “Will you miss me?”

She considers teasing him, but she knows he doesn’t ask in jest, not truly, and her heart is too fragile to do anything but answer true.

“Every moment.” His embrace tightens further, enough to almost hurt, but she welcomes it, wants a physical pain to match that in her heart.

“It pains me to think of you alone in this bed without me,” he says.

“Who says I’ll be alone?” she asks, pushing up to look at him and feeling herself prickle, the knowledge that always hides under everything between them – that when he leaves it is to go to home to his wife – rudely elbowing its way into reality. Conflicted emotions chase one another across his face like a hunter with a rabbit. He opens his mouth as if to start a hundred sentences, but can’t seem to choose one, so he sighs heavily, and smiles with inadequate apology.

“Let me pretend, then,” he pleads.

“I would take no lover,” she says in a whisper, not knowing if she says only what he wishes to hear or the plain truth. It’s impossible to imagine wanting anyone else in this moment.

“And with no lover, what would you do?” he asks, voice pitching lower, sweeping over her like his hands so often do. “Show me, Dacey. Please. Give me the memory to hold.”

It’s a simple request, one she’s glad to give in place of all that she can’t, all she would give him if only allowed. His eyes are hot and admiring when she rolls to her side and backs away from him, levering herself up to sit against the bedstead, knots and spurs of carved wood pressing in to her bare back. She lets him look for long moments as she makes unnecessary adjustments, her breasts moving as she does, the shift of her legs revealing her to him only in brief flashes. She draws it out, makes no effort to hasten. She plans to give him a good long memory.

Her breasts are sensitive enough that she gasps at the first brush of her hand, and not for effect; she feels a tug between her thighs, aided by his piercing stare. The tug grows stronger when she flattens her hand over herself, her nipple a stiff drag across her palm that makes her tilt her head back and release an unsteady breath.

“Gods, Dacey,” he says, his own breathing just as unsteady. “You could not possibly be more beautiful.” She lets her eyes slip closed as she touches her other breast as well, kneading and caressing them both, pushing them together to spill up over her hands. It’s for herself as much as it is for him, the feel of her own body in her hands heady and lush. She catches both nipples, rolls them between her fingers and tugs, and Robb’s heartfelt groan makes her smile. When she opens her eyes, the longing on his face makes heat flare between her legs, so that she feels achy and damp. He would have both hands on her if she let him, she knows, replacing her fingers with his own to pinch and knead.

She’s coy when she finally lowers one hand to slide down her belly and tuck between her closed thighs, fluttering her middle fingertip just enough to hint at the pleasure to come and make a sweet tingle spread under her skin. Slowly, bit by bit, she lets her knees part with the increasing movements of her hand, shifts a bit as if to get comfortable all while twisting herself more to his gaze, though still holding her knees close enough that he gets only glimpses. When she’s worked herself enough to feel wet and dripping, she pushes two fingers down to dip inside and collect the evidence of her pleasure. Her fingers glisten in the firelight as she raises them to her lips to suck clean, looking straight into his eyes and pursing her lips enough to be obscene as she draws them up over her knuckles, her own flavor tangy on her tongue. Robb’s moan sounds truly pained, and he pushes up on his elbow to reach for her. She stays him with a foot on his chest, pushing to hold him away and not missing how his eyes drop to her cunt now it’s revealed to him. She knows she’s pink and swollen to his gaze, that he sees her shining wet and needy. His fingers twitch as if to reach for her again and she pushes harder with her foot.

“You will not be here to touch, my wolf,” she says, drawing his eyes back to hers. “We must keep the memory pure.” He swallows hard and nods, eyes gone black. She should draw her foot away, deny all touches, but she can feel his heart thunder under the arch of her foot, the hair on his chest wiry and almost ticklish when she curls her toes against him. He lifts one hand to her ankle when she returns her hand to her cunt, cups his hand in a mirror of her own. She dips her fingers once more to pull them slick and slippery over herself. There is no more coyness as she rubs and circles, nothing to keep his eyes from her hand when she works three fingers inside herself, writhing to meet them.

“Robb,” she says when she’s on the cusp of release, knowing that she can’t trust herself to speak but speaking anyway. “I already miss you, this will never be enough.” She hates the words and how her voice breaks over them, how they prevent her from pretending she is strong, that she’s a Mormont and needs no man. But if she is weak, then he’s equally so.

“I know, sweetheart,” he rasps, his voice as much a caress as his hand holding her foot. He raises it to lick over her ankle and press his face to her instep. “Nothing will ever be as good as being here with you. Nothing could ever make me so happy or so whole, and I will spend my whole life wanting you, I swear I will.” He sets her foot to his chest again, curls his fingers higher, smoothing over her calf to cup the back of her knee, his lips following to kiss the bone under skin at the front of it.

“Come for me, Dacey,” he whispers sweet into her skin. “Come for me the way I’ll always want you to.”

Her body heeds his words so eagerly that Dacey could be ashamed. Her leg stiffens at his chest, pushing hard enough that his lips slip down her shin, and she pulses and throbs so hard around her fingers she fears she might black out.

“Robb,” she cries out, almost sobbing, “Robb, Robb, Robb,” and before she’s even done shaking he’s on his belly before her, nosing her fingers aside to lap at her release, licking and sucking until he drives her to another.

“Dacey,” he says as she comes again, shaking and jerking into his mouth, “Dacey, Dacey, Dacey,” and then his lips are finding the bud above, he’s sucking on it like ripe fruit and she’s coming again more quickly than she would have believed possible. She thinks maybe she’ll come for his tongue over and over, all night, and every night hence. She’ll come for him forever.

His last night comes too soon, as she’d known it would. All day they keep close, but it isn’t close enough. It could never be close enough, and Dacey knows it never will. He joins her in her bath that evening. She settles back against the edge of the tub and pulls his back to her chest, crossing her arms around his shoulders and burying her face in the soft curls of his hair, not caring that they tickle her nose.

“Dacey,” he says, when they’ve soaked together long enough for Dacey’s fingertips to wrinkle like dried fruit. She hums a question, turning her face to press her lips to the shell of his ear. “I want Rhella to know me.”

“She knows you,” Dacey protests softly.

“No, I want her to truly know me. For more than just a single turn of the moon. And I want to know _her_ , I want to see her grow tall and hear her sing and see her become a warrior just like her mother. I want to come back. Every year. I want to be part of her life, Dacey. And yours.”

“Robb,” Dacey breathes, struck by the enormity of what he’s saying. Of what he wants. Of what it means for her and their girl. He turns to look at her. She can’t remember the last time she saw him look so serious about anything.

“Would you allow me to return?” he presses, searching her face intently. Something in her is afraid to answer, afraid to consider such an idea lest it be snatched away from her.

“Could you?” she hedges.

“I’m King,” he says, flashing her a rakish grin. “I may do what I wish.” But she can hear in his voice that he doesn’t believe such a thing any more than she does. Were it true, he’d not need to visit; this would be the hundredth bath they’ve shared rather than one of only a handful. Were it true, he’d not be setting sail on the morrow to leave her and their daughter. Sadness steals through her, and she retreats into formality, girding her heart against the pain that she knows will come.

“You are always welcome here, Your Grace.” 

“His Grace may be welcome,” he persists, for once not allowing her retreat the way he is usually gracious enough to do. “But is Robb Stark?”

“Yes,” she whispers. He kisses her then, before she can say another word, pulling her around to his lap, heedless of the water that slops from the bath to splash over the floor. He’s made love to her more times than she could count by now, but none of those times has ever been like this, so urgent and insistent, each trying to climb inside the other.

He fucks her in the bath, and then on the floor with puddles of water drying all around them, and then in her bed before they fall into fitful sleep. The sky has not yet begun to lighten when he turns to her once more, kissing her and holding her to him and sliding inside her the way that will always be achingly familiar, no matter how much time stretches between them. They’ll say goodbye on the docks later, but this is their true goodbye, quiet and desperate in the hour before dawn. She holds him with each limb and every muscle, keeps him with her in the only way she’ll allow herself, willing the sun never to rise. The pink streaks on the horizon are an offense, and she curses the yellow light that follows them to flood the sky and take him away from her.

Rhella permits him to carry her to the docks. Dacey walks behind them along the path, her hand twisting in the fur between Grey Wind’s shoulders, as if by holding him she could hold Robb. She looks at Rhella’s small hand fisted in the auburn curls at Robb’s nape that match Rhella's own, feels such a sharp lurch in her heart that her step falters and she has to steady herself against Grey Wind’s side. Rhella understands better this time what the ship means, that Robb will not be coming back tonight after he boards it. She’s unhappy at the idea, but Dacey doesn’t think she’ll be as bereft as she was when Jon left, something that’s a relief even as it’s a different kind of pain.

Dacey is keenly aware of his guards as Robb makes his farewells, watching them all. They’ve maintained the polite fiction that Robb is here as King this whole time, but still Dacey can’t hold him the way she would wish, the way he holds Rhella, so long that she fidgets and squirms in his grip. She can’t kiss him and draw a part of him into her lungs to keep while he’s gone. Her mother is luckier. She has no fear of what any might think if she collects Robb into a crushing hug, and when Robb looks at Dacey over her shoulder, when he shifts a hand from Maege’s back to slide his knuckles over Dacey’s arm in the only caress he can steal, it almost breaks Dacey’s heart. When he turns to her and takes up her hand, she squeezes it tightly, putting every bit of her heartbreak into the grip of her fingers. She’s often regretted not saying goodbye when she left him in Riverrun, but she knows now it was the right choice. The only choice. She could never have left if she’d had to face this. It is only Rhella that keeps her from following him on board, bidding the captain to sail to Braavos or Lys, throwing everything away to make a new life for the two of them. For a fleeting, giddy moment, she thinks perhaps she could do just that, wrap Rhella to her chest with her cloak and sail straight off the edge of the world with Robb. But those are only beggar’s dreams and reality has no room for such foolish romance, no matter how much she might wish it to be so.

“Dacey,” he says, and oh, the softness in it could make a stone weep. “I’ll be back. I promise.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” she says.

The ship is ready to sail by the time he finally boards, Rhella clinging to Grey Wind so tightly that it takes Maege and Dacey both to pull her away. Yes, she understands far better now what leaving on a ship really means. Dacey stays, her hand holding firm to Rhella’s, the both of them watching as the deckhands cast off and scurry about the ship like ants. She stays as the ship pulls away, Robb and Grey Wind at the rail watching them in return, until they’re far enough that she can’t see them anymore. She stays until the ship is only a blur of sail on the horizon and then she stays just a few minutes more.

“Mama,” Rhella says, tugging at her hand and shaking Dacey out of the clouds of her thoughts. “Mama, are you here?” Dacey looks down at her daughter and smiles.

“Always,” she says. “Come on, cub, let’s go back home.”


	3. Til The Summer Comes Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It is the end of Rhella’s ninth year and the second year of summer when Maege falls ill.

It is the end of Rhella’s ninth year and the second year of summer when Maege falls ill. A simple fever, the Maester says, and Maege brushes aside any concerns, saying she’ll be right as rain in a few days, but instead the fever worsens, becoming some new and altogether worse malady that the Maester can’t name. It lingers, robbing her breath and her strength, making her eyes glassy with pain. Food loses its appeal, so that she shrinks alarmingly, her skin growing dull, hair becoming brittle. When Dacey brings the girls in to visit, her mother is so diminished that she looks more like a person than the she-bear she usually is, and it terrifies Dacey in a way she doesn’t dare show.

“When will grandmother be better?” Doro asks after one afternoon’s visit, and though Dacey tells her that she doesn’t know, she’s begun to worry that the answer is never. By the look on Doro’s face, she’s had such a thought herself, though, and Dacey knows that this is yet another pain from which she can’t protect her daughters.

Doro had been born in Rhella’s fourth year, after the first of Robb’s return visits. Dacey hadn’t allowed herself to believe Robb would truly return until his ship had arrived with the tide. But he’d come that year, and then again and again in the years after, each visit giving him a new daughter to meet on the next. First there was Doro, then Corliss and Margane, one after the other, as close together as weeds, a small pack of terrors that ran all over the island and happily received their father’s doting upon the occasion of his visits. Each time she’d found herself pregnant, she’d given thought to the weight of it, to her children being brought into a world of unrest, with a father so distant and often consumed with another family. But each pregnancy had also brought her such unbridled happiness, such joyous expectation. No child of hers would lack for family, and she and her sisters had been brought up by a mother alone, after all.

None of the girls have so much Tully coloring as Rhella does. They are a combination of Stark and Mormont, with their dark curls and their stormy eyes. It sets Rhella apart, and Dacey knows it's something she's keenly aware of. Rhella has only become more prickly and independent as she's grown, never climbing into Dacey's lap like Corliss or wanting to be picked up like Margane, rarely joining the girls after training as they play. Dacey had watched them one day, a day they'd gone from comparing morningstars to braiding each other’s hair. Rhella stood apart as her sisters wove crowns of wildflowers and set them atop each other’s heads, arguing good-naturedly over who was queen and who was merely a princess.

"We're none of us princesses," Rhella had said to them, her matter-of-fact tone far too adult for such a still-small girl. "Father would never claim us. He doesn't even want us." Her sisters had been confused – they'd spoken of being princesses only as a game, too young yet to understand that the man who visits them each year is a King or what that might mean for them. But Rhella was old enough to understand the world some, and she'd always been far too smart for her own good. It had broken Dacey's heart to hear her say it, moreso when Rhella turned and looked at her, a mute challenge in her eyes for Dacey to contradict her that somehow managed to be both defiant and pleading. There was little Dacey could say; matters of realm and unrest had kept Robb away for years now. He'd barely even met Margane, seeing her only for a handful of days when she was a babe, in a meeting Jon had arranged at Deepwood Motte so that Robb could see her before going south to deal with unruly Houses. As smart as Rhella is, she could never understand if Dacey tried to explain what kept Robb from his visits. Dacey doesn't know that she herself always understands.

But Bear Island has always been constant, the pole star that all else wheels around. So when Maege takes to her bed and stays there for week upon week, it’s as if gravity has ceased its pull for Dacey. She does her best – they all do, she and her sisters taking turns sitting with Maege, Alysane’s oldest occupying the younger children as much as she can, the small staff they keep becoming even more like family as they care for Dacey’s diminishing mother, making all manner of foods to coax an appetite out of her – but it all feels too foreign. Bear Island is not Bear Island without Maege’s booming voice and lively presence to fill its halls.

It is a desperate hour that allows Dacey to send the letter. The message the raven bears is hastily scribbled, a plaintive missive telling Robb of her mother’s illness and asking him to come to Bear Island. The words are far too inadequate to encompass the desolation she feels, the untidy need for him to be here. But she knows if she deliberates over the message, she’ll never send it, and she _needs_ to send it, needs to allow herself this one selfish indulgence. Once it’s left her hands, some small part of her wants to catch the raven out of the sky or even shoot it down with an arrow. Instead she turns away, forcing her feet back to Maege’s room where she’ll sit through the morning and afternoon and long into the evening, counting her mother’s labored breaths and hoping they aren’t numbered.

He comes with no notice, no raven to warn of his arrival. There is only word from a messenger, spoken in a low voice to a steward over supper, of a man arriving from Winterfell with the latest ship. Dacey’s heart skips violently at the words. Robb, a voice in her head whispers. He’s come, he’s here, Robb is _here_. It’s only when she hears the messenger say that Lord Snow will be arriving within the hour that her heart climbs down from her throat to drop with a sick splash into her stomach.

Rhella has no such reaction. When she hears the name, she gives a startled little shriek and bolts from the table, only stopping when Dacey barks her name and bids her finish her meal in the tone that Rhella knows full well is not to be ignored. It hasn’t been nearly so long since Jon has been here as it’s been for Robb, but over two years have passed since his last visit, long enough that Doro and Corliss remember him only dimly and Margane shows no recognition at the mention of him, only setting herself to her bacon with more concentration. Rhella, though. Rhella remembers.

She races to the yard when the steward announces his arrival and Dacey finally permits her to leave the table, calling out "Jaw!" and "Woof!" ahead of her. She pelts down the steps and out the door, running forward to fling herself into the arms Jon has open to receive her the second he dismounts. He swings her in a wide circle, her feet flying above the ground, then sets her down so that she may roll about on the ground with Ghost, the two of them a pale blur. Dacey lingers in the doorway to watch their reunion. She cannot be so unalloyed in her welcome. It makes her impatient with herself; Jon is not at fault for not being Robb. But still her smile is forced, and her feet as she welcomes Jon and leads him to the hall are leaden.

“I’m sorry he could not come,” Jon says in a low voice after she’s called for a plate for him. “ _He’s_ sorry he could not come. There is…” Jon hesitates, his eyes darting to hers, and Dacey knows she doesn’t wish to hear the reason that the father of her children has sent his brother in his stead.

“It matters little why,” she says briskly. “He is a King and has his duties, as we have our own.”

“Dacey,” Jon says, and there’s a world of warmth in it, sympathy and compassion and care. Dacey reaches out impulsively and lays her hand over Jon’s.

“If it can’t be him, I’m glad it’s you,” she says, and if there is bitterness in her words, at least there is no lie.

“I would see Maege now, if I could?” he says immediately upon finishing his plate. A kneejerk refusal sits on the tip of Dacey’s tongue, suddenly; Jon seeing Maege on her sickbed feels as if it would be too real, a confirmation from the outside world of how dire things are. But such a realization could only be postponed, not prevented. Jon seems to read Dacey’s hesitation, and concern crosses his face.

“Unless you think it would be too much for her?” 

“No,” Dacey assures him. “It will be good for her. She is sick of our faces, I’m sure.” She smiles to put Jon at ease, but his concern lingers, and she realizes it is not only for her mother, but also for her. Her chest catches as if caught by an invisible hook, and she’s saved from the embarrassment of teariness by Rhella popping up from her seat as if launched from it and catching Jon’s hand in hers.

“I’ll take you,” she says, turning to Dacey immediately after, an eager plea on her face. “Please, mother, may I take him?” Dacey laughs, catching Rhella’s chin in her hand and giving it a fond shake.

“As if I could deny such a request. Go on.” The other girls have no intention of being left out, so all of them troop off together, chattering and flitting around Jon like small birds as Rhella clutches his hand possessively. Dacey trails along behind; her feet have taken this path more times in the last weeks than they have for the rest of her weeks combined.

Maege shares none of Dacey’s disappointment at seeing Jon. She calls his name in delight, struggling to sit up until he rushes to her bedside and places a hand upon her shoulder, laughingly telling her not to stand on his account. The girls crowd in around him, clambering carefully up onto the bed around their grandmother. Maege smiles and laughs with them, all of them made brighter and happier by Jon’s presence, a fresh audience for their stories, and someone with fresh stories to tell them in return. All at once it’s too much for Dacey – too much feeling, too much struggle over the past weeks – and she needs to get out, needs to flee from all the things she can’t control. From the awareness of all the people she cannot protect. They won’t miss her, she knows, and even if they do, she has a House to manage, a keep to run. Surely they’ll forgive her.

*****

Her mother’s room has emptied of all but a maidservant when she returns. Dacey shoos her away to retire, taking her place in the chair at Maege’s bedside. Maege is asleep, lying still on the mattress. The Maege Dacey remembers from her youth could never have kept so still. Even asleep she’d bristled with energy, kicking away the furs and rolling restlessly from one side to another. It has curiously been one of the hardest parts of Maege’s illness, seeing her lie so still in sleep. It seems close to lying still in death in a dark corner of Dacey’s mind, and she has to force herself not to prod Maege just to see her move. She stares at her mother’s motionless form, looking for the tiniest shift, the smallest movement to give her reassurance. She is studying Maege so intently that at first she doesn’t see Rhella slip into the room. It is the white flash of her nightclothes that catches Dacey’s eye, and she turns to look at her daughter, taking in the shift that’s already grown too short, though she’s had it barely half a year, her bare ankles and feet showing pale beneath the hem.

“And why is my little monster out of bed at this hour?” 

“I couldn’t sleep,” Rhella admits. “My eyes kept popping open.”

“There was much excitement today.” Dacey reaches out as Rhella draws close, pushing her rusty curls away from her face. Rhella nods. She bites her lip, and Dacey knows she has something she wishes to speak about but does not know how to say. Rhella has always worn her heart on her clothing, there for all the world to see. Dacey waits, knowing she won’t be rushed. If nothing else, her children have taught her infinite patience.

“Mother?” she says finally, and Dacey suppresses her smile.

“Yes?”

“Are you glad Jon is here?”

“Of course,” Dacey answers. Rhella looks down, drawing one bare toe along a joint in the flooring. “Rhella, why do you ask?”

Rhella ignores the question, asking instead, “Did he come because grandmother is going to die?”

“Oh cub,” Dacey sighs. “No, that isn’t why he came.”

“But grandmother might die,” Rhella presses. Dacey searches for an answer that is both truth and lie, something that will keep the weight of the world from dropping so fully on her still-too-young daughter’s shoulders.

“We all die someday, cub. Gods willing your grandmother won’t be doing so for quite some time.”

“Gods willing,” Rhella echoes, but it’s less an invocation than it is a dubious acknowledgement of the precariousness of life, of being at the mercy of forces larger than herself. It’s far too much to be in the voice of a little girl. Rhella’s bottom lip trembles, and Dacey is reminded all over again of all the things she can’t protect her from.

“Mother?”

“Yes, cub.”

“Am I too big to be on your lap?” Dacey doesn’t answer, only leans forward to sweep Rhella into her arms, pulling her into her lap and snugging her back against Dacey’s chest. Rhella’s hair is soft and sweet in Dacey’s nose. She’s so big now, but still so small, such a small creature to be struggling with such big feelings. When her sniffles turn into tears, Dacey squeezes her closer, rocking back and forth in an instinctive rhythm, one that her body remembers from all of her girls’ early days. 

Rhella has cried herself asleep by the time Jon appears in the doorway, Alysane behind him to take her turn sitting with Maege. Without a word spoken between them, Jon moves to stand before Dacey and catches Rhella up into his arms. He lifts her so easily, in such a natural motion, and she curls herself around him even in her sleep. For all that Robb had been doting and attentive and easy with the girls during his visits, Rhella had always held herself in check with him and he'd been tentative with her in a way he wasn't with his younger daughters, more fearful of rejection. It's Jon that Rhella's always embraced wholeheartedly, and it's something that makes Dacey's heart twist into a conflicted knot now as she stands to follow him, watching Rhella submit to Jon with complete trust, not even fully waking as he carries her out of the room, nor when he gently tucks her into bed beside Doro, tugging the furs to her chin the way she likes.

Dacey takes his arm as he escorts her to her own chambers, feeling soft and vulnerable with the keep so quiet around them, dark pressing in on the windows like a living thing. He hesitates at the door, biting his lip in much the same way Rhella had earlier. It makes Dacey smile. Her daughter is not the only one whose heart is so easily read.

"Speak your mind, Lord Snow," she says.

“I know you’re angry at Robb for not coming.” Jon says. Dacey dismisses it with a wave of her hand.

“I’m only irritated with myself for thinking he might,” she says. “I know better. I am not so foolish as to think I should come first.”

“Surely there are some times you should come first,” Jon says quietly. Dacey waves that away just the same, though it opens a half-healed wound in her heart.

“Sometimes I think if I’ve just been selfish, having such an affair,” she says. They’re not words she ever expected to say to another, but Jon has a way of putting her off-center, making her act entirely unlike herself. “It does not seem right that I’ve willingly subjected my daughters to such a thing.” 

“I was the product of someone’s selfish affair,” Jon points out with a smile. “I turned out all right, didn’t I?” Dacey laughs. She feels a surge of gratitude for him, and she reaches out to hold one hand to his cheek.

“Thank you for coming, Jon.”

Jon’s arms are almost rough when they envelop her. For all the times that he’s visited, all the hours they’ve spent together, she doesn’t think they’ve ever embraced, but she puts her arms around him instinctively, easily, welcoming the warmth of his kindness and affection that have been given when she needs them most. Tears prickle beneath her eyelids and she fights them back, pressing her face to the rough weave of his weskit. He only holds her tighter, a wordless, soothing noise rumbling in his chest under her cheek. Suddenly, Dacey is seized by a fierce wish that she could crawl into his lap and cry herself to sleep just as her daughter did with her an hour ago. She thinks Jon would permit her to, and that’s enough to let her steel her spine and raise her head, only the wetness of her eyes betraying her.

“I shall see you in the morrow,” she says, not meaning the words to be a question, but somehow they sound as if they are, or more accurately a plea for reassurance.

“You will,” he answers, and it’s enough to allow her to steel herself to face the night alone. 

*****

Jon folds himself into their lives as easily as he always does. He takes the girls on as his particular responsibility, occupying their days to allow Dacey and her sisters the freedom they need to attend to matters of House and keep, to tend their mother, to tend themselves. It’s a relief to not feel selfish for the small luxury of a nap in the afternoon, or a long bath by herself every once in a while. It makes Dacey feel almost human again. But it’s as if the taste of normalcy has reminded them all just how much they’ve missed it, how long they’ve been banded together in mutual worry and strain. Dacey begins to feel snappish, her temper flaring at the slightest affront. Alysane knows better than to engage her, but Jorelle has always been combative and she matches Dacey snap for snarl, the two of them rowing over most everything. But few of their arguments have been as ludicrous as today’s; Dacey never thought she’d be barking at her sister over some bloody soup. Jon and Rhella are watching them wide-eyed as they square off.

“The rest of us are perfectly capable of petty concerns such as food, you know,” Jorelle tells her, her voice acid. “You don’t have to control _everything._ ”

“You think this is what mother needs?” Dacey demands. “The two of us at each other like snarling dogs fighting over a bone? I have enough to worry about without you throwing fits.”

“You’re not the only person who worries,” Jorelle bites back, her lips flattening into a thin, angry line.

“Oh really?” Dacey answers just as hotly, fake disbelief in her voice. “Thank you, Jorelle, I’d had no idea.” But Jorelle talks over her, words rushing from her as if she’s held them back for days.

“You don’t have to do everything yourself like the rest of us are simpletons,” she shouts. “The world doesn’t always turn around you!”

“Oh, and I suppose you’d like to do it all instead?” Dacey shouts right back, an edge in her voice that she doesn’t recognize. “Fine, it’s yours, the books, the house, the repairs, the staff. It’s all yours, go right ahead and take care of all of it! Teach me a lesson because I bloody well don’t care anymore.” She can see the flicker of confusion on Jorelle’s face, the alarm on Rhella’s and the concern on Jon’s. “I don’t care about any of it,” she says, not meaning a word of it but unable to stop herself. Suddenly her feet are taking her out of the hall, out through the main door and into the yard, they’re running and taking her with them, until the trees of the godswood fly past her in a blur and she has to stop from the stitch in her side. Still there is something within her that she wants out, some toxic emotion she needs gone. Fingers trembling, she looks about her, needing some way to expel this anger that ripples under her skin. Windfall apples litter the ground around her feet and she stoops to pick one up, straightening and hurling it at the nearest tree in one smooth movement. It’s overripe, close to rotting, and it splatters satisfying against the trunk, flying into a hundred pieces. Dacey wants this weakness within her to break apart just the same. She stoops again and collects three more apples, throwing them in quick order, one, two, three, and still she trembles, still she picks more apples up to hurl them faster and harder.

She’s standing still, juice dripping from her fingers, when she realizes Jon is standing and watching her, an expression so caring and concerned on his face that she doesn’t know whether to cry or chuck another apple at something.

“I worried you’d swum halfway to Deepwood Motte by now,” he says. She laughs, and the sound is too bitter by half.

“I’d not get so far. I’m tethered to this place, didn’t you know, Jon?” she says. She looks down at her hand, at the bits of apple that are wedged under her fingernails and dotted on her palm. “And now I’m wasting perfectly good apples. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Suddenly Jon steps forward and scoops up an apple. He tosses it and catches it once, then looks at her with such soft understanding that she really does think she might begin to cry. “Fuck the apples,” he says, and he turns and hurls the apple he holds against a tree. The bark of laughter that escapes Dacey is more surprise than anything. Reflexively, she catches the apple he tosses lightly to her.

“Go on,” he says, nodding towards the tree. “That tree deserves it.” She laughs again, and then she throws the apple. It feels more satisfying this time. He goes for another at the same time she does, and soon they’re standing there, hurling apples at a tree, and it all strikes her as too ridiculous not to laugh.

“Oh Jon,” she says, “we must look positively mad.” She wipes her hand on her breeches and moves to sit on a fallen log. It’s high off the ground; her feet swing, the tips of her boots barely touching the ground, and it makes her feel like a little girl. Now that her anger is exploded with all the apples, she feels only small and sad and alone, so very alone.

“He didn’t come,” she says quietly when Jon sits beside her. “I never ask for anything. Every time he’s called, I’ve come.”

“I’m sorry, Dacey,” Jon says. He loops his arm around her shoulders and hugs her tight to his side, his lips resting against her hair. “I wish he’d come as well.” She shrugs, feeling his hand tighten on her shoulder at the motion.

“Kings do not answer to bannermen,” she says. Jon opens his mouth as if to protest, but she cannot bear such argument right now, so she stops him with a shake of her head. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Jon.”

He smiles against her temple. “That’s not something you’ll need to find out anytime soon. Are you ready to go back?” Dacey nods. When Jon offers her his hand, she takes it, letting him pull her up and lead her back home.

*****

She and Jorelle don’t apologize to one another – such things are not in their relationship – but there is an unspoken truce between them. It is a bit more careful than Dacey would like, more like treading on eggshells than it’s ever been before, but Dacey would rather that than their endless picking at one another.

The day Maege eats a full meal feels like a triumph. Dacey feels even more proud than she did when Rhella first fed herself after weaning, though she has to laugh at herself for thinking of her mother as being like her daughter in such things. But there is no denying the similarity in the clumsy fumble of Maege’s fingers around her spoon and in the determined set of her chin, though Maege would not thank her for pointing it out. Maege smiles in accomplishment when she finishes the meal on her own, though it has clearly sapped her strength.

“Sleep, mother,” Dacey tells her. She tucks the furs around her, smoothing them carefully, putting all of her love and fear and pride in her mother into the gesture.

“It’s too early,” Maege protests, but her eyes are slipping shut even as she says the words. Dacey leans down and presses her lips to her mother’s forehead. The skin there is warm and alive and suddenly Dacey wants to share her happiness with someone, with the people who matter most to her.

She finds the girls out in the yard with Jon. They’ve already had their supper – Dacey missed it, as she’s missed so many meals of late – and Rhella and Doro are sparring with wooden practice swords in the last hour of sunlight, Jon observing with a critical eye. Dacey leans in the doorway to watch them unseen. They have been well-trained for their age, learning from Maege and Alysane, as well as Dacey. Jon mostly watches and nods approvingly, calling out to Rhella to watch her weak side, or to Doro to shift her left foot. When he calls for them to stop and approaches Doro, his hand reaching for hers on the hilt, she shies away and gives him a cautioning look.

“Alysane says not to listen to you when you correct our grip,” Doro informs him. Dacey has to stifle a laugh at her artlessness, as well as at the look on Jon’s face.

“Oh she does?” he asks.

“Yes,” Doro nods, “and she says not to tell you she said so.”

“Doro,” Rhella sighs.

“Well she does,” Doro says with a look of patent exasperation for her sister.

“Perhaps you should show me, then,” Jon says to the two of them, and if he’d not won Dacey’s loyalty long ago, that would do the trick now. He turns to Rhella and spreads his arms in invitation. “Come, Ellie, I’m your willing pupil.”

Rhella smiles almost shyly, a pleased flush on her cheeks, and she shows him the grip that Dacey and Alysane have taught her, making a minute correction to his own when he emulates her. Dacey watches as he spars with Doro, Rhella the one calling out corrections this time, corrections that Jon takes gamely.

“Girls,” Dacey calls when they’ve paused for breath. “You’ve schooled Jon long enough, time for bath and bed.” The girls make token grumbles, but obediently they stow their training gear and race each other into the keep, Ghost darting ahead of them to stake his claim to their bed. Jon follows them at a slower pace, putting away his own gear and joining Dacey where she stands, admiring the colors of the sunset. Summer always brings such lovely days, and she’s enjoyed far too little of them of late.

“How is Maege?” Jon asks her.

“Better,” Dacey answers, the word feeling light and happy on her tongue. “She fed herself a full meal tonight.” She grins as she says the words, unable to keep her sense of triumph and achievement from bubbling up in her throat. Jon looks genuinely thrilled, and he clasps her shoulder.

“That calls for a celebration,” Jon says, sound almost as light and happy as she feels. “I managed to bring a bottle of Dornish red with me, if you’d care for some.”

“Lead the way,” Dacey laughs. Gods, the idea of a celebration feels impossibly decadent, even so modest a celebration as a simple glass of wine with a friend. She has a ridiculous urge to skip the way the girls do when they’re excited, but she tamps it down. 

The windows of Jon’s chambers show none of the colors of the sunset, only the darkening blue of night. It feels cozy, somehow, as if they are the only two people for leagues. Jon presses a glass of wine in her hand and she downs it instantly, grinning as she holds it out to him to refill.

“Is that any way to treat a good Dornish red?” he asks with a laugh, but he refills it all the same, even going so far as to down his own and pour himself another, so as to keep pace with her. It is so lovely to feel relieved, to feel hopeful. Dacey knows that she should be cautious, that Maege’s illness has been unpredictable. But it’s impossible to check herself, and selfishly, she doesn’t wish to. This one night she’ll be careless and hopeful and free of rules.

“All gone,” she says with a pout after she’s emptied her third glass. It’s well enough; she’s been eating little and sleeping less. Even half a bottle of wine has gone straight to her head, making her feel lovely and relaxed, her body as boneless as a length of linen as she leans back against the sofa. They’ve both somehow ended up on the floor. Jon grins and leans forward, offering her his glass. She gifts him with a bright grin, setting her glass on the floor beside her and taking his to drain it as well. “All gone,” she says again, though this time with a decidedly cheerier tone. Jon laughs bright and loud and hand her the bottle with a wink, tipping it up from the bottom as she holds the neck, encouraging her to drink directly from it. She needs little encouragement.

“Now what?” Jon asks, grinning back at her, looking as lovely and relaxed as she feels. So lovely. Gods, how does she always forget how very handsome he is?

“Now you,” she says, and passes the bottle back to him, pressing it into his hand when he would refuse. She watches his throat work as he drinks, his head tipped back. Suddenly a question occurs to her out of nowhere, and she’d has far too much wine to stop herself asking it, of which she’s rather glad, since she’s quite curious. "Why have you never taken a wife, Jon?"

Jon chokes a bit on the wine, lowering the bottle and wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “Um,” he says dumbly. “Well. I suppose it’s never presented itself as an option.” Dacey levels him with a dubious look, taking the bottle back from him.

"No options? I find that difficult to believe, pleasing as you are. Surely you've not remained chaste and as pure as your surname," she says with a grin, one that he answers with a sheepish smile of his own.

"Not entirely, no." She hoists the bottle in salute and takes a swig from it, licking the rim of the bottle as she does and suddenly feeling her heart beat a bit faster at the way he watches her. She lowers the bottle slowly, chasing a drop of wine across her lips with her tongue, and his eyes on her feel strangely like a caress, making her body throb in heightened awareness.

"Perhaps I am more drunk than I thought,” she says slowly, “but I could swear I taste you on this bottle." Dacey licks her lips again after she says it, and the way Jon watches her with suddenly hot eyes makes her heat and curl, like a scrap of parchment thrown onto a fire.

Jon's eyes linger on her lips for too long a moment to be entirely proper. "Close to kissing," he muses, almost dreamily.

"Only if you've never kissed before," Dacey answers. And then something demanding and heedless sweeps over her, for she hears herself continue, saying, "And you've kissed before. I remember you were quite good at it."

They've never spoken of it, not once, that long ago night. But judging by the flush staining his cheeks and the way his eyes dart to hers and away, Jon remembers it as well as she. "I thought you'd forgotten," he says.

"I thought _you'd_ forgotten," she counters with a smile. He grins then, something boyish in it though he hasn't been a boy for years.

"My first kiss from a beautiful older woman?" he says. "I could hardly forget such a thing." His eyes don't dart away this time. They fix on hers, and then drop to her mouth. They're as hot as the fire at her back, as warm as the wine that traces a path down her throat when she takes one last swig from the bottle and sets it aside.

"Are you still as good at kissing?" she asks, knowing that she asks more than that. An ache gathers in her gut and threatens to have her trembling and shaking like an untouched girl.

Jon's voice drops to a thrillingly low register when he says, "Better," and then he's catching her with his hands when she falls onto to him, his lips are catching hers, and his touch is hotter than the fire and the wine and his eyes combined.

Oh, how I've missed this, Dacey thinks. Jon's lips are sweet and tangy and soft, his tongue is lazy and slow against hers in a kiss more intoxicating than the wine that still burn in her chest. Or maybe it's not the wine after all, maybe it's her need that's burning her from inside, her desperate loneliness that doesn't feel half so dire when Jon is with her. He cages her face in both hands, coaxes her mouth open and kisses her so deeply that she could imagine they're a single person, so sweetly that she could cry from it, so potently that she begins to think it's him she's drunk on, rather than any spirit. She doesn't remember moving or climbing into his lap, but she's there now, her ankles hooked behind the small of his back as she sits in the cradle of his crossed legs, his hands kneading up either side of her spine to mold her to him, his mouth and teeth and tongue dismantling her with every kiss and nip and lick. Gods, she wants him, she wants him so very badly it scares her. She has been alone for so long.

"Dace," he murmurs, licking the corner of her mouth, sliding his lips over her jaw so he can nose at the hollow below her ear and make her shiver. "Dace, gods, you taste even better than I remembered."

"Did you think of me often?" she asks on a gasp as he presses his tongue beneath her earlobe, the gasp edging up into a whine when he drags a wet trail down her throat to plant kisses over the notch between her collarbones.

"Once or twice or half a hundred times," he says with a wry laugh, so much appreciation and desire in his tone that she could practically peak from it right then. "No other woman compared." He sets his teeth to the swell of her breast just above the neckline of her tunic and her entire body tightens, throbbing with the need she's long suppressed. The laces of her tunic dissolve under his fingers like magic, and then his hand slides inside to touch her, and his groan is so heartfelt it could make her laugh if she had the breath for it. "I thought of your teats near as often," he says. 

Dacey doesn't answer, and couldn't even if her mind was capable of forming words. She only puts one hand over his against her breast, the fabric of her tunic between them as she traps his hand, encourages him to touch and caress. He needs little encouragement, as his mouth recapturing hers shows. He kisses her until she can't breathe, can't think, until she forgets her mother's illness, her troubles, her own name. And then he kisses her longer, so long that the fire burns down to almost nothing and her muscles refuse to work, leaving her trembling and shivering in his lap like a newborn foal.

"It's late," he says at long length, when his kisses have become sweet and soft, little caresses peppered over her face and throat. "You should sleep. You had no rest last night."

"Mmm," Dacey agrees, turning her face to his once more, not yet ready to go back to her cold bed alone. For a heartbeat, she thinks to say he had just as little rest, hopes he'll invite her to share his bed and thinks if he doesn't, she'll invite him to share hers. But while kissing a man other than Robb – kissing his _brother_ – may not feel like a true betrayal, sharing his bed might, and Dacey hesitates and pulls away. Jon looks at her with soft understanding, his hands curving protectively over her ribs somehow feeling arousing and comforting and forgiving and a hundred other things she couldn't name if she tried. "Yes," she says at last, hearing more sadness than she'd like in the word. "I should retire."

Jon helps her to her feet, and laughs good-naturedly when she hauls him up off the floor with a helping hand of her own. She can't keep herself from fisting that hand in his tunic and pulling his mouth to hers when she stops at the door, needing one last taste of him to chase away the cold loneliness that's settled over her in the scant space between where they sat before the fire and the door. One more kiss, she thinks. One more kiss to store against the cold.

"Goodnight, Jon," she says.

"Sleep well, Dacey," he answers.

That last kiss is all she can think of as her feet automatically follow the path to her chambers, a path they've tread hundreds of times. As she goes through her ablutions – a splash of water on her face, fingers tugged through the tangle of her hair as she re-braids it for the night, her boots pulled off – life begins to impose its reality once more, and the familiar weight of worry settles over her. Suddenly she’s angry and resentful. She doesn’t want that worry. Not yet. She’d rather Jon's kiss, and though guilt tugs sick at her stomach, she can't keep herself from wanting it, wanting to feel the heady rush of desire that she knows he would give her and that would drown out all else for at least a little longer. But Robb... She stops stock still, her fingers poised to tie off her braid with a leather cord. _Robb is not here,_ a voice in her head says, _he is with his wife._ Dacey feels herself shake with the power of her realization. Jon is here; there is no ocean between them, no distance or walls or wives. Jon is _here_ and she is beholden to no one.

He answers her knock on his door quickly, as if he was kept from sleep by complicated thoughts as well. He does not seem surprised to find her there, and he opens the door to admit her wordlessly, only the faintest touch of curiosity on his face as he takes in her bare feet, the end of her braid left untied and beginning to unravel. Dacey says nothing, offers him no words or requests or explanation. She only tugs the hem of her tunic from her breeches, lifts it over her head and throws it aside. Jon's eyes never leave her face; he looks at her with focus intent enough to be unsettling if it weren't exactly what she needed. She unlaces her breeches, pushes them down her thighs and calves along with her smallclothes, her hands rough and impatient, so she can step out of them and kick them aside. Then she steps full against him, her bare body pressed to him from ankle to shoulder, her naked skin feeling the laces at the throat of his tunic, the soft leather of his breeches, the harder leather of his boots. She wraps her arms around his neck until her forearms lie double over each other and her face is only a breath from his. Only then do his eyes flutter closed for a moment, longing showing clear on his face as his hands come up to her waist. She waits for him to open his eyes again, waits for him to see her. And then she kisses him, and in the kiss there's a new road that she's chosen to take.

He responds instantly, ardently, and it breaks something within her like an egg, a cracked shell letting heat flood through her limbs and out to the tips of her fingers and toes. She tilts her head and slides her tongue along his, licks into his mouth as she walks him back towards his bed. Their feet tangle and she stumbles until his arms slide around her fully to lift her up, her feet settling on top of his as he continues their path to the bed, and all the while he kisses her back, he wants her back. Oh how very much Dacey needs to be wanted back.

"Jon," she says when the side of his knee hits the bed and he stops, devoting his full attention to kissing her mouth, her chin, the hollow of her throat. "Jon, I need... I need..." But her words desert her, she can find none to express the roil of feeling inside her. He kisses her deep and hard enough to make her dizzy, and then drops a disarmingly gentle kiss on the tip of her nose.

"I know what you need," he says in a voice so husky and assured that it only makes her dizzier. Then he sinks to his knees and, with no preamble, sets his mouth between her legs.

His curls might be the softest thing she's ever felt; they coil around her fingers as her hands reflexively spear through them, steadying her against the exquisite feel of his tongue tracing delicately over the cleft of her and stealing in to dip inside her where she's already so wet for him that she can feel herself dripping. He rumbles an appreciative sound, the vibration of it almost as potent as his tongue, and then he works his tongue into her in earnest, licking and sucking at her cunt like she's something delicious to be savored.

"Better than I ever imagined," he says roughly, and licks over her again, licks into her, pulling her desire from her with the curl of his tongue. She’s mindless with it, with him, with the feel of him working at her with lips and tongue. He finds the bud of her sex and suckles with long, deep pulls that set her to trembling. She gasps his name, grips his hair more tightly to hold herself steady, but despite that her knees buckle and she sits heavily on the feather mattress behind her. Jon’s mouth never leaves her once. He shoulders her knees apart and pushes his tongue deep with a contented sound. When tremors begin to take her, he slides two blunt fingers inside her, gestures as if beckoning her release, and her body grants it willingly, almost desperately, with such force that she curls in on herself, curls her toes, curls her fingers in his hair to hold his face closer still.

“Gods, _Jon_ ,” she breathes, “I never knew your tongue was magical.” He chuckles and she feels it, gods, she feels his laugh in her cunt and it’s so good she could die and if he ever stops, she will die, right after she kills him.

Jon has no intention of stopping, though; in a motion so swift and smooth she barely realizes it’s happening until it’s done, he hooks his hands under her knees and swivels them up so that she lies on the bed, and then he’s there between her thighs, he’s groaning with pleasure as he parts her with just the tip of his tongue so that it almost tickles before closing his lips about her and sucking once more. Dacey lets her elbows slide from beneath her, the feather ticking soft beneath her head, yielding under the hands she fists in it. Even when she’s too sensitive for more, he still pulls his lips down the inside of her thigh, over the crease of her hip where the skin is thin and soft, across her belly that once was almost flat but now bells softly, evidence of her lovely girls. He traces every silvery mark on her skin, maps each freckle and scar, suckles at her teats as insistently as he had at her cunt. All the while, he strokes his hands over her, pets her like she’s softer than mink, and when she drops her knees open to the touch of his fingers, he moves between her thighs with a sound of pleasure and buries his face in her cunt again. Twice more he brings her to release, his perfect mouth giving her such perfect pleasure that she can’t help but cry out long and loud, her voice shivering as much as her body does.

When she can take no more, she pulls at his tunic, jerking when still he licks over her achingly sensitive flesh. She has to laugh; he is certainly dedicated to this particular pursuit, gods bless him for it. She has to catch his chin and draw him up, else she thinks he might stay there forever. But her kiss seems to be just as wanted, and he curls his tongue between her lips when she pulls him up, licks into her mouth like he licked into her cunt.

“You still wear your boots,” she laughs, sliding her toes over the smooth, cool leather encasing his ankles. “Take them off.” Jon meets her laugh with his own. He refuses to relinquish her mouth when he reaches down to tug them off, his body contorting absurdly in the effort. “And your breeches,” she says when her toes find his stocking feet. She reaches for the laces to help, but he catches her hand and shakes his head against hers.

“Leave them,” he says, and for a moment she’s distracted by how gloriously wrecked his voice sounds.

“Magical you may be, but you can’t fuck me with your breeches on,” she tells him, but he shakes his head again.

“I couldn’t take advantage.” There is genuine regret in his voice and on his face, but also a sort of determination.

“And if I told you it would not be taking advantage?” she asks. His fingers tighten over hers on his laces, a momentary slip in his control. He is so affected by her desire for him. It’s something she tucks away inside herself.

“I would still feel it was, and I couldn’t. You’ve been through too much of late, Dace. I only want to make you feel good.” His words are beseeching, his eyes like that of his wolf begging a treat. He kisses her, and it’s even more drugging, even more dizzying. His hands seem to be everywhere at once; thumbing at her teats, sliding over her ribs, spreading and sinking into the yield of her backside. She arches into his touch and opens her mouth to his, amazed that he can make her want him again when she’d thought herself sated. His voice is no more than a whisper now, and she feels his words as much as she hears them. “Let me make you feel good, sweetling.”

“Yes,” she answers in a whisper of her own. “Make me feel only good, Jon.” His fingers are tucked between her legs now, warm and rough and perfect as they draw circles upon her flesh. She opens her thighs to him, she invites him to take and begs him to give, and he is all too willing to do both. This time when she comes with his mouth on her, she screams, the sound of it echoing sharply in her chambers, joined by Jon’s rough sound of satisfaction.

He seems to know that she can truly take no more. After only a sweet kiss dropped over her mound, he pulls himself up to lie beside her and pull her against his side, his chest pillowing her cheek. Dacey shakes with the aftermath of her pleasure, feeling the pulse of her cunt slow along with the thunder of his heartbeat. It is only when her body is finally limp and depleted that she looks up, craning her neck to see his face.

“Jon?” she ventures. He makes an inquiring sound, twisting to look at her, his hand idly spooling through her hair. “Thank you,” she tells him. Whether she thanks him for giving her such bliss, or for distracting her from her worries, for helping with her children and her mother, or just for coming when she needed someone…that she doesn’t know. It doesn’t seem to matter to him. He smiles at her, the corner of his mouth tugging down in that curious way it has. Then he tucks her head beneath his chin and presses a kiss to the top of her head.

“Sleep,” he urges her.

For the first time in months, she drops into sleep almost instantly, his heartbeat her lullaby.

*****

She slips out before the dawn. Magical or not, Jon can only keep life at bay for so long, and Dacey has her mother to check on, children to rouse, a household to run. He is at the table in the hall when she comes in with Alysane to break her fast long after everyone else has eaten. Ghost is curled around his feet like a furry manacle. He’d not come to Jon’s chambers at all last night, and Dacey wonders now if the beast misses him after such a short time. It wouldn’t be surprising; Jon is an easy person to miss. Already she wishes she could go back to the evening before, when time seemed to suspend itself in his easy company. But she knows she won’t allow it to happen again. For all the passion of the night before, Dacey knows it was the act of a friend, one she’ll not abuse.

He greets her with a warm smile now, sliding a plate before her and filling her glass. They talk as they eat, with the same ease they’ve always had. It occurs to Dacey to think it odd that they could share such intimacy and then go back to normal, but then her relationship with Jon has always been an intimate one, so perhaps it’s not so odd as it could be. It makes her even more grateful to him, that he would give her such care and expect nothing in return; that little between them has changed, no matter what they’ve done. 

It’s only weeks later that anything seems different. He doesn’t even have to tell her that anything is amiss. Dacey knows by the look on his face that Jon has something he’s reluctant to tell her of; it’s written in the hunch of his shoulders towards his ears, as if he’s protecting himself, and in the line that’s appeared between his brows. She can read him by now, and he seems to read her as well, because he sighs and answers her question before she can even ask it.

“I told Robb,” he says.

“Did you,” she counters mildly, though her chest tightens a bit. “About what?”

“About that night.” For a moment, Dacey blinks at him. It seems impossible for so many members of one family to be so pig-headedly noble, but these Starks are determined to confound expectation.

“Forgive me for saying, but you seem to share a bit more than is demanded even of brothers.”

“I couldn’t keep it from him.” Jon is apologetic, but there’s a firmness to his words.

“And I could,” she says, unable to keep herself from bristling.

“Dacey,” he says softly, pleadingly, and she sighs.

“And his reaction?” Jon gives her a rueful smile and then scrubs at his face with both hands, looking more tired than Dacey has ever seen him. 

“He was less than pleased.”

There’s a sinking feeling in the pit of Dacey’s stomach. It irritates her; she doesn’t owe Robb her loyalty. But Jon does, she supposes, and it is as much for him, if not more, that she feels no small amount of apprehension when she asks, “How much less?”

“He told me not to return,” Jon says, seeming to have trouble even saying the words.

“Oh, Jon,” Dacey sighs. It’s a pathetically inadequate thing to say, but Dacey could say nothing else; there are no words that would be right. “Yes, I’d say that is less than pleased.” I’m sorry, Jon. You were showing me a kindness. It’s unfair that you should be punished so for it.” Jon slants her a look filled with something she cannot name but that has something fluttering in her chest.

“I did not do it only for you,” he says, his voice husky, and Dacey’s breath catches.

“Nonetheless,” she says, shaking her head to dispel the effect of Jon’s words. “You’ll stay here, of course.” A pained look crosses his face, and she’s struck by a strange urge to apologize, though she doesn’t know what for.

“Dacey, I couldn’t,” he protests.

“Why, you’ve some other woman to show kindness to next?” He smiles at her jape, but continues to shake his head. “You are of this House, are you not?”

“Your mother said that to me once,” Jon notes with a laugh.

“She also told you not to be a ninny, as I recall.”

“She did,” he smiles, but then his face sobers. “Dacey, I couldn’t impose.”

“Then it’s settled. You’ll stay.” Her tone brooks no argument. Dacey has no doubts that having him stay is the proper course, but if she had, they would die in the face of the relief in his expression, the wounded pain that lingers in his eyes. She cannot imagine what it would be to be cast off by family. The very idea is unthinkable. It makes her want to run a comforting hand through his hair the way she would her girls. It’s with a pang that she thinks that he is one more person she cannot protect, no matter how she wishes she could.

*****

There is little change; one day Jon is a guest on Bear Island, the next day it is his home. Rhella is beside herself with joy when Jon tells her he’ll be staying on. She begs to be permitted to sit beside him at meals, sometimes just touching him with shy, darting hands, as if to reassure herself that he’s still there, that he has not left as he’s always done before. It weighs on Dacey, even as her heart warms at the happiness on her daughter’s face; these men who come only to leave have taken a toll on her oldest, just as they took a toll on Dacey when she was not far from Rhella’s age.

He fits into the cloth of their lives as if he’d been woven into it from the start. Soon it’s as if he’s always been there. Frequently Dacey finds herself remembering him as part of things that happened long before he came, his presence insinuating itself into every long-past corner of her life. Somehow her mind insists that he was there when Lyanna was born, and it was his shoulder she stood by when she watched Maege ride to war during the Greyjoy Rebellion. Her memory becomes a tricky thing; often she has to stop herself and force herself to remember things true.

Maege begins to recover, slowly – excruciatingly slowly, it seems to Dacey – but steadily. Still Dacey refuses to be too hopeful, she stubbornly insists on bracing herself for another downturn. It’s only when Maege inserts herself into a conversation Dacey has with Alysane on the repairs being done to the outer wall, that Dacey finally begins to relax. Maege insists even from her bed on setting the stones anew rather than repointing the mortar, vehemently enough that a maidservant hurries in, concerned at Maege’s raised voice. But Dacey has never felt more relieved. It is more the mother she knew to disagree, to assert herself, to do more than sit idly by while others made decisions, and Dacey is beyond grateful to have good reason to argue.

Jon has been with them for close to a year when Margane takes to calling him Papa, a habit Corliss soon follows. Even Doro, who still remembers Robb and asks after him sometimes, even she slips often enough that she calls him Papa more often than not. At first Dacey corrects them, telling them that their father is across the sea and may someday come to visit once more. But it is something akin to a lie, and it hurts her, as kind as she intends it to be, and she finds she cannot continue with it for long. It would be difficult, regardless, to stop something that pleases her daughters so and brings such joy to Jon’s eyes. He is the father they’ve known, no matter who sired them.

“Papa,” Margane says one evening, as they all sit together in Dacey’s solar. Maege is well enough to join them this evening, and the mood feels festive and light. Margane is sitting snug against Jon’s side on the floor before the fire as she “helps” him curry Ghost’s coat, freeing the burrs that have become tangled in the wolf’s fur. Jon makes a hum of assent, though he does not look away from his work. “Why doesn’t Rhella look like you?”

None of the younger girls seem to think anything of the question, but it makes Dacey shift uncomfortably. Maege places a thin hand on her arm in unspoken comfort. Rhella is always so self-conscious about looking so much more like her father than any of her sisters. Jon’s eyes dart swiftly to Dacey’s, and for a long moment they only stare at one another, caught off-guard by the unexpected question. 

“What do you mean, sweetling?” Jon asks, directing his voice to Margane, but turning his gaze to Rhella where she sits at Ghost’s head, looking suddenly huddled and miserable.

“All the rest of us have dark hair like you, but hers is so red.” 

Dacey opens her mouth to answer, but before she can even think of what to say, Doro speaks, not looking up from the game she plays with Corliss.

“Because Rhella looks like Father,” she says.

“But not Papa,” Margane persists, her brow wrinkling as she puzzles it out.

“No, our other father. The one in Winterfell.”

“Oh,” Margane says. “Is Winterfell very far? Is that why he never comes to visit like you said he used to?”

“Who cares?” Rhella asks defiantly, her voice harsh and sudden. It hits Dacey like a slap. Rhella’s relationship with Robb is so complicated, and she feels far too much resentment for such a young girl, but Dacey doesn’t know what she could possibly ever say about it. At the bottom of it all, Rhella is right. Robb isn’t here, and may never be again – he's sent no letters, made no mention of visiting, indeed he seems to have forgotten they exist at all – and it makes Dacey feel so sick to put her daughters through such a thing that she can hardly bear it. Doro bristles at Rhella’s tone, though – she remembers Robb best and has never had Rhella’s conflicting feelings about him – and she opens her mouth as if to fight. 

“Did I ever tell you about the time your father and I turned everyone’s clothing blue?” Jon says quickly, diffusing the tension that had begun to gather in the room.

“No,” Doro says, looking to Jon eagerly, her game with Corliss forgotten entirely. Even Rhella looks interested, the scowl dropping off her face. 

“We thought it was our friend Theon’s clothing, but it was the whole household’s,” he says with a laugh.

“How did you do it?” Rhella asks.

“Did you get in trouble?” Doro chimes in.

“What does this have to do with Rhella’s red hair?” Margane asks in confusion, and they all burst into laughter, even Rhella. 

“I hear tell the Wildlings north of the Wall think such red hair is lucky,” Jon says, sending a wink at Rhella. “They would call Rhella kissed by fire.” It’s not an answer, in truth, but Margane is easily diverted. Rhella peeks up at Jon through the mass of her fringe, suddenly shy.

“Truly?” she asks. Jon smiles at her and nods. She’s just close enough for him to reach out and tousle that red hair, leaving her even more mussed than usual.

“Our Ellie is a good luck charm,” he says. Rhella smiles fully at that, her quick heart turning from resentment to pleasure. Jon does not look at Dacey again, only returning to his task, carefully picking a burr the size of a peach stone out of Ghost’s ruff. Dacey isn’t sure if she’s disappointed or glad that he does not look up to see her watching him, sure that the surge of deep affection for him is displayed on her face clear as day. 

*****

The morning Jon stays abed until well past breakfast, Dacey knows something is wrong. He rarely sleeps more than an hour or so past sunrise, but now it’s near to the midday meal and he still hasn’t risen.

His chambers are dark and too warm when she enters, almost stifling. She’s not been here since… Her skin heats as she remembers just what had happened the last time she was in this room, on the bed where he lies now, how he’d lain her on that bed and buried his face between her thighs for what seemed like hours.

He’s only a huddled shape under the furs. He stirs restlessly at her approach, shifting his feet so that they catch and pull at the furs, inching them down his body to reveal his bare, sweat-slicked chest. A split second of panic rises in Dacey’s chest – just like her mother when it started, she thinks – but then she sees the telltale spots that scatter across his skin, and all her pent-up breath leaves her in a rush.

“It’s only what you deserved,” she says, relief making her rebuke harsher than she’d intended. Not that he’s fully awake to hear it, regardless. He starts at her voice, his head jerking up as he blinks with gummy eyes and focuses on her.

“Dace,” he says in a voice so dry and wrecked that Dacey winces in sympathy. “Why is my head on fire?”

“You’ve caught the spotted fever from the girls,” she tells him, fetching a ewer of water from the bedside and filling a tumbler for him that he takes with a shaky hand. “I told you to leave them be or you’d fall ill.” Jon drinks the water in three long gulps, beads of it escaping at the corners of his mouth and streaming beneath his chin, and blindly holds the tumbler out for her to refill.

“Corliss wanted a story,” he mumbles after he’s drained it again and slumped back onto the bed, the tumbler falling from his limp fingers to the mattress and spotting it with dark droplets of water that match the spots spreading from his throat to his ribs and scattering over his face like freckles. Dacey picks up the tumbler and sets it on the table, feeling equally strong waves of fondness and exasperation. It’s hard to hold the added load of a sick man against him when he was only being a soft touch for her children. As he always is. Dacey sighs and sets the ewer next to the tumbler, both in reach should he grow thirsty again.

“Sleep,” she says, setting a cool hand to his forehead, instinctively knowing it will sooth him the way it does her girls. “I’ll have someone check on you hourly.”

“No,” he says, reaching up to catch her hand, his skin so hot it could be on fire. “You,” he says carefully, as though speaking clearly is an effort. “Will you check on me as well?” The request makes Dacey’s heart twist strangely in her chest.

“Yes,” she agrees. “Now sleep. And don’t scratch. Wouldn’t want to scar that pretty face of yours.”

“’s not pretty,” Jon mumbles, his hand sliding from hers as he gives in to sleep. “’s rugged.”

“Of course it is. And such a pretty rugged.”

He’s still sleeping when she comes to check on him at the tail end of the afternoon, when the setting sun is streaming through the windows. He’s kicked the furs off entirely; they lie heaped on the floor beside the bed. Ghost has claimed them as his own and he merely flicks his ear at Dacey as she steps past him to settle on her hip at the edge of the mattress. Telltale red furrows mark Jon's bare chest where he’s scratched at the spots. As Dacey watches, he lifts his arm even in sleep to scratch at himself. Easily, she catches his hand, only to be startled when his fingers snap around her wrist in a cuff, yanking her down onto the bed next to him, his eyes suddenly open and filled with a defensive panic.

“Jon, it’s me,” she says in a soothing croon. “It’s all right, it’s just me, it’s Dacey.”

“Dacey,” he echoes, the panic in his eyes replaced by the haze of fever. “I dreamed of you.” His hand loosens until his fingers circle her wrist gently.

“A dream of me had you wild-eyed and panicked?” she asks, amused. “You wound me, Jon.”

“That night,” he says, as if she hadn’t spoken. “I dreamed of that night with you.”

“That night?” Dacey hedges, though in her gut she knows just the night he means – she’d thought of that night the second she walked in the room, after all. A thrill shoots through her again at the thought of it, of his lips and his hands and his tongue on her. His eyes heat with something past mere fever and she knows he’s remembering it too.

“The night I tasted your cunt,” he says on a sigh, removing any shred of doubt. Dacey has to bite back a needy sound at the words, heat twisting in her belly with a sweet ache. She’s unsure of what she should say, but Jon doesn’t wait for a response. He murmurs low words even as his eyes grow heavy and unfocused.

“Never tasted anything so good,” he says, “gods, I could have kept my mouth on you forever. I dream of it so often. I dream of _you_ , Dace.” His head slips forward as his eyes close entirely, his forehead as hot as a brand against hers. She waits for his breathing to grow even and his body to relax fully into sleep before she allows the words past her lips.

“Sometimes I dream of you as well,” she whispers, leaning into him the barest bit – only for a moment – before gently disentangling herself and rising from his bed, her hand trailing over his cheek in an unguarded gesture she’d not allow herself if he were awake. Ghost raises his head this time as she steps past, unconcerned at the dismissive flick of her fingers.

“Quiet you,” she says. He makes a low noise and lowers his head to his paws again.

*****

It’s an innocuous moment that has her thinking she feels far more than friendship for him. Perhaps that’s why her feelings catch her so off-guard; the moment is so ordinary that she has no defenses raised to protect her heart. They’re going over ledgers together, reviewing debts and stores for the coming year. Money is low – money is always low – and Bear Island’s coffers are depleted by the repair of the main hall’s roof, the reinforcement of the eastern battlements, the endless demands of house and keep. There will be few extras this year, no new swords or staff. Dacey bites her lip but Jon shrugs and gives her a grin meant to cheer her and ease her worries. 

“So we’ll do without,” he says, laying a hand over hers. “We can manage.”

It’s the “we” that does it, given as it is so freely and thoughtlessly. Nothing truly keeps Jon here. For all that they think of him as belonging to House Mormont, he is not one of them. He has no need or obligation to them past what he chooses to give. And yet he says we, as if Dacey’s burdens are his own, as if her fortunes are his. There is no romance or suggestion in the hand placed over hers, but still she feels tiny sparks race under her skin. She knows he feels it as well when his grin melts and his eyes drop to her mouth for the barest moment. Slowly – slowly enough for either of them to stop – Dacey leans towards him, watching his face come closer and closer, a face that’s become so dear to her. Jon holds himself as still as stone, only the tightened grip of his hand over hers betraying any of his thoughts.

The kiss is nothing like those she’s shared with him before. There is no desperate need or unfocused passion. This is something altogether more intense despite its chasteness, something real enough that Dacey might be discomfited were it with anyone but Jon.

She pulls away, keeping her eyes closed for several long moments before opening them to look at him. It feels as if everything should be different after such a kiss. But he doesn’t look different. He only looks like Jon and she’s not sure how to feel about such a thing.

He is all she thinks on in the following days. Her mind feels as if it’s being tugged in all different directions. There is no avoiding how much it would feel like betrayal to love a man other than Robb. And it would be love; Dacey knows that no relationship with Jon could be merely physical. His friendship is too dear to her, he knows her too well, has become too much a part of her life. Too much a part of all of their lives, her youngest daughters sometimes calling him papa. But he is not their father, and it only makes everything muddy, bringing more questions than answers to light.

“I fail to see the problem,” Alysane says when Dacey confides in her. “Jon is here and Robb is not. _Has_ not been for years now. He doesn’t even know Margane.”

“He’s met her” Dacey protests, feeling strangely defensive. 

“Once,” Alysane counters, “when she was a babe too small to know him.”

“That’s hardly his fault, Aly, he is a Ki-”

“I said nothing of fault,” Alysane cuts her off. “He does not have to be at fault for it to be true. And I have never seen a man so besotted as Jon Snow. If you don’t put him out of his misery, Jorelle might make the attempt.”

“ _What?_ ” Dacey says, her spine stiffening in surprise at the thought, at the very _thought_ of Jorelle lying with Jon. Alysane only shrugs, but her lips quirk with mischief. Dacey would curse her if she didn’t think it would only give Aly more satisfaction at having hit her mark.

It’s entirely foreign to Dacey, wanting in such a complicated way. _Want_ has always been followed in fairly easy order by _have_ ; even with Robb it had been ultimately simple and easy, despite the complications of their situation. There’d not been this conflict, nor such contradictory feelings that had her changing her mind over and over, wanting and fearing signs of Jon’s interest in equal measure. She revels in the way his eyes follow her, even as it dismays her. The day he watches her eat a peach with hot, darkened eyes practically sends her to madness, not the least because she’d found herself playing the part of a temptress for him, taking slow bites and chasing drops of juice across her lower lip with her tongue just to see the naked desire on his face. She thinks he must be as confused as she, unable to make sense of how she teases him one moment and retreats the next, like a young maid carefully skirting the edge of a newfound power over men.

It is not until Galbart Glover comes with an offer of marriage that Dacey knows what she feels. He is a good man, and Dacey could never forget how House Glover has aided her family for years. Once she might have thought him a good match. Once but no more.

“You make a kind offer, Galbart, but I couldn’t accept,” she says, smiling to soften her rejection, though she knows he does not offer out of love or any particular attachment.

“Then another of my house, if you’d prefer. We want to see you cared for. You should not shoulder this burden alone.”

“I’m not alone,” she tells him. “I have my sisters, and I have my mother yet. But thank you, Galbart, I know your offer is true and I appreciate it greatly.”

It is only after he leaves that she thinks to herself, _my sisters, and my mother, and Jon. I have Jon._ Suddenly she wants to see Jon, wants to see him right this second, wants to act on this new knowledge she has of her feelings. He’s in the solar when she finds him, a heavy book in his lap that he pays no mind as he gazes sightlessly at nothing in particular. She watches him from the doorway for a moment, allowing herself the indulgence of thinking it might be she he thinks of to have him looking so dazed.

“Jon,” she says, and his head snaps up, his eyes instantly going dark at the sight of her. It makes her think perhaps she was right to indulge herself, and her heart begins to pound. She moves to the table and fills two cups of wine. “Drink with me.” He pushes to his feet and joins her to stand at the table, his blunt fingertips covering hers for a moment that feels far too brief as he takes the cup she offers. They drink in silence for several long moments, she she’s begun to think he will never give her the opening she needs when he meets her eyes, a question on his face. 

“What was Glover’s purpose in visiting?” he asks.

Dacey keeps her eyes fixed on his, wanting to see his reaction. “He came to propose marriage.” Jon’s face barely changes, but she can see the slightest bit of tension knit his brow and tighten his mouth. Silence spins between them like a tapestry until he takes a long swallow of wine and clears his throat.

“He’s a good man,” Jon says, his voice mild. 

“Yes.”

“Would you be happy with him?” The question is genuine, and Dacey feels something in her chest throb and then melt, suffusing her with warmth.

“No,” she says softly.

“Perhaps you shouldn’t accept him,” Jon says, then cringes at the words and amends, “for whatever my opinion is worth on the matter.”

“Your opinion is worth a great deal to me,” she says. “If I said yes, you’d have advised me to accept him?”

“Yes,” Jon says. There is no lie in his answer, Dacey knows, and she loves him for it.

“I told him no.” Jon’s relief is visible and immediate. He slumps like a mummer’s puppet with its strings cut, closing his eyes for a long moment. A scrap of a smile flickers across his face, a smile so complex that Dacey couldn’t begin to know all of its meanings. “Would you have been hurt if I had accepted him?” she asks.

“Truthfully?” Jon asks, opening his eyes to look at her. She nods. “Yes.”

“And yet you still counseled that I should.”

“Only if he would have made you happy,” Jon points out. Dacey reaches for his wineglass, setting it with her own on the table. Then she steps between his feet, spreading her fingers over his chest as his hands instinctively come up to her hips. His eyes are dark and intent on hers, his breath a warm puff of air over her lips. She can feel his heart beneath her palm and it beats like a signal drum, steady and strong.

“He is not who would make me happy,” she says, and then she kisses him.

His mouth is so familiar to her, for all that she’s tasted it only a handful of times. They move together easily, naturally, his hand coming up to cuff around her nape as he kisses the breath from her lungs. It’s different than any other kiss has been between them, despite how familiar it feels; this time no one is drunk, no one is vulnerable, no one is broken. This time the kiss is something they choose for themselves, and it’s as if it were the first time.

She finds herself clinging to him, rubs her hips against his in frank invitation. They have spent the past moons teasing themselves and each other, and she finds she has no patience and only wants all of him at once, and now, right now, right this very moment.

“Jon,” she pants against his jaw, licking over the rasp of stubble on his chin and cheek. “Touch me, please, now, I need…” She can’t finish her words, but he doesn’t need her to; before her words die he’s unlacing her breeches and snaking his hand beneath, dragging her smallclothes over her with sweet, teasing friction. His fingers when they steal inside her are a sweet shock. She gasps and clutches her own fingers in the shoulders of his jerkin, digging her nails into the resilient give of the leather. He croons a wordless sound at her, crooks his fingers and rubs his thumb in tandem to have her trembling in need, desperate for his touch. It takes only minutes for him to bring her release and she drops her forehead to his jaw, breathing hard as she rocks her hips with the movement of his hand.

“Jon,” she says, “please-” but whatever else she might say is interrupted by a rapping at the door, Rhella’s voice calling them to luncheon. Jon’s pained groan is quiet but heartfelt. He eases his hand from her smallclothes, catching and holding her gaze as he closes his lips around them and sucks them clean of the taste of her. It sends a bolt of heat shooting through her and she sways, gripping his shoulders more tightly as she closes her eyes against the need still twisting in her gut.

“Come to my chambers,” she says impulsively as she steps away from him, twitching her tunic and jerkin back into place, tucking the laces of her breeches away. “Tonight. When everyone is asleep.” He only nods in answer, then he catches her hand in both of his and presses a hard kiss to her knuckles. The gesture is courtly but potent. It makes her want nothing more than to feel his lips on hers again, feel his fingers inside her, but reality intrudes again with another knock at the door from Rhella, and she pulls away.

“Tonight,” she reminds him quietly as she reaches for the door handle, turning to look at him over her shoulder, at his face so pale and handsome and dear to her.

“Tonight,” he answers in a whisper to match her own. It sends a shiver down her spine, one that she feels all the rest of the day each time she thinks of him, of what she will do with him when night falls. She has never been so nervous about laying with a man before, not even when it was her first. Then she’d been eager and assertive, bold as she explored each new feeling. She feels more like a maid now than she ever did then, all nerves and fluttering hands. She’s torn between reveling in the feeling and despising it. 

She seeks Jorelle out after supper. She and Jorelle have never been especially close, but she is the sister that Dacey thinks most likely to be able to help her. Jorelle’s rooms are on the far side of the keep, where she can see sunset strike her windows and the smell of the sea is only the slightest tang of salt in the air. Dacey has little occasion to be near her rooms, a fact that’s not lost on Jorelle when she opens the door to Dacey’s knock.

“To what do I owe the honor?” she asks, raising her eyebrows curiously.

“I need to borrow something from you. May I enter?” Jorelle regards Dacey steadily for a long moment, then steps aside to allow her entrance. She shuts the door behind her and looks at Dacey expectantly. Now that she’s here, Dacey has no idea how to begin, so she merely blurts out her request.

“Alysane mentioned once that you had a nightshift. From Dorne. A very…fancy one. I would like to borrow it, if I may.”

Jorelle’s eyebrows have climbed to her hairline by now. She seems surprised enough that it puts her beyond comment; she merely crosses the room to her wardrobe and rummages within, producing a filmy nightshift in a green so pale that it nears white. It’s a far cry from the serviceable linen shifts Dacey wears to sleep, when she wears a shift at all. She has an absurd though that her roughened fingertips will snag and tear the fabric; it seems so insubstantial when she takes it from Jorelle’s outstretched hands.

“Is there something you need it for?” Jorelle asks, her tone as sweet as it is falsely innocent. “Or some _one_ , mayhap?” Dacey can only scowl and blush, reminding herself not to fist her hands around the delicate cloth she holds. Jorelle laughs. “Took you long enough,” she says, giving Dacey a genuine smile. “Pity, though. I was hoping for a crack at him.”

“You’re a true sister, Jorelle,” Dacey says wryly, but she returns the smile with one equally genuine.

She fusses over herself for the better part of an hour, scenting her bathwater with lavender, combing her hair dry before the fire so that it lies in loose waves about her shoulders. She hesitates in putting on the nightshift, thinking it will be too much, that she will be too unlike herself. When she finally slips it over her head, she feels as if she is still bare; the cloth is thin and close to sheer, moreso in the light of the fire. But it is different than being bare – the cloth sits on her skin with a sensuous weight, making her aware of every movement she makes. She feels as if her every sense is heightened, and for a moment it is overwhelming enough that she thinks to strip off the gown, to greet Jon in a plain shift, or even wearing nothing, but then his knock sounds at the door, his voice calls to her softly, and there is no turning back.

His eyes grow wide and dark when she opens the door to him and he sees her; they roam down her body and back up to her face and make heat spread under her skin in unfurling tendrils.

“I’ve wondered what you sleep in,” he says, his voice so husky that it sends a shiver through her.

“Have you?” she asks, not bothering to disabuse him of the notion that this is how she sleeps each night, in a flimsy, impractical shift from Dorne. There’ll be time enough for him to learn that. Time enough, that is, unless it all goes bad, which is a possibility Dacey refuses to entertain when he’s looking upon her as if she’s everything he’s ever wanted.

“Often,” he says. “I’d never have been able to sleep again if I’d known to think of you thus.” He ghosts one hand over the strap at her shoulder, a delicate web of lace that snags under his rough fingertips.

“Sometimes I sleep naked,” she says casually, grinning when the words make him shudder, his eyes fluttering closed.

“You are wicked,” he tells her. He’s slipped his fingers beneath the strap of the gown. He knuckles are gliding over her shoulder slowly, hypnotically.

“You love it,” she counters.

“Gods help me but I do,” he says, and then his mouth settles on hers with a sigh, tasting her just as slowly and hypnotically as his touch slides over her skin.

She’s spent the day wanting him, and now that he’s here, she wants him to hurry, wants all of him now, right now. But Jon won’t be rushed. He catches her hands as they fumble at the laces of his weskit, holding them and kissing them, his lips touching each fingertip in turn. It is strange to think that he’ll be here in the morning, and probably as many mornings as she can count afterwards. Dacey understands men leaving. She’s not sure what to do with one who stays.

He never hurries, his pace does not increase. He kisses along her jaw, down her neck, and over her collarbones, tastes the peaks of her breasts through the cloth of her shift. She has to reach out and steady herself on the bedpost when he drops to his knees and slides the hem up her thighs bit by bit, peppering the skin he exposes with kisses, licking the shell of her knee, nipping the inside of her thigh with blunt teeth. His tongue on her flesh when he reaches the apex of her thighs is familiar and shocking all at once. The sight of him looking up at her with his mouth moving between her legs, tasting her with slow drags of his tongue, works on her like a bolt of lightning. She shivers, feels her knees quake, staring back at him until he gives in to the obvious pleasure he finds in her and his eyes drift closed with a deeper curl of his tongue inside her.

“Still magic,” she sighs, tilting her head back and curling trembling fingers through his hair, holding him to her and urging her hips into the bliss of his mouth. She can feel him smile against her, then he closes his lips about her to suck until she peaks with a long shivery cry.

Somehow his weskit and tunic are gone when he stands to kiss her long and deep, and his breeches disappear by the time he lies on the bed with her stretched above him, though his mouth never left hers. Her knees part around his hips as if by habit, allowing her to feel him hard and hot through the thin cloth of her shift, pressed against her cunt that aches for him. His pained groan when she rocks her hips is a repayment for his slow torment of her, and she sits up and grins down at him, riding him as if ahorse, pulling her hips along his length in a slow drag before sitting up on her knees so that he must buck up to reach her.

“Not wanting to go slow now, are you?” she teases. She laughs at his groan, but relents, leaning forward to kiss him as she pulls her shift free and feels him against her. Someday she’ll want to see him, want to explore him with her hands and mouth, but for now she just wraps her hand around his cock and guides him inside her, needing him far too much to wait any longer. She sinks down onto him, sitting up to take him in fully, her shift draping over his stomach. For several long moments, she holds still, adjusting to the feel of him inside her, reveling in the fullness of him. She can feel his hands flex on her hips, can hear the rough saw of his breathing as he struggles for control. Feeling wicked, she squeezes around him, fluttering her muscles until he gives a pained cry, his fingers tightening hard enough to bruise.

“Dacey, I beg of you,” he rasps, though what he begs for, he does not say. But Dacey knows, and she begins to move, smiling at the pleasure on his face, gasping when his hand works beneath her shift to rub over her and give her the same pleasure.

It does not feel like the first time with him. Everything is familiar somehow, the break in his breathing, the feel of his cock moving inside her, the gentle care in his hands as he runs them over her in a constant caress. Suddenly his mouth feels too far away. She catches his wrist and pulls him to sit up against her, hand over hand along his arm until she can wrap her arms about his shoulders and fit her mouth to his. Easily, he readjusts, guiding her hips with his hands, licking deep into her mouth, getting inside her in every way possible. When he pulls away to trail kisses over her cheeks and jaw, she hears his murmur close to her ears, telling her how good she feels, how sweet she tastes, how he’s wanted to be inside her for so long. His words push her to her release as much as his cock and hands do. He waits until she’s shivered into stillness against him, until she drops her forehead against his and cups his face in her hands. Then he allows himself to spend inside her, and Dacey knows that though everything between them is different, it will always be the same somehow.

*****

It is all unlike anything she’d had with Robb. Each day with Robb had seemed rushed, some matter always needing his attention, some pressing concern intruding to pull him away from her and their children. Days with Jon are sweet and slow and seemingly endless. For a long while they spend most of their time together doing little more than kissing. Jon can taste her mouth for ages, kisses her as if he has all the time in the world, no task so pressing as the exploration of her lips and mouth. He kisses her until her jaw aches and her tongue is sore from reaching and her lips are so chapped they could almost crack, and still he wants her, his hands cradling her face and his mouth sinuously moving over hers, sweet and needy and utterly unhurried. She’s never known a man to enjoy kissing so much. Something about it makes her feel like a girl again. She’d never been very sentimental about sex, seeing it largely about filling a need, but spending hours doing little more than kissing with Jon makes her wonder if she’d missed out.

Sex is much the same. He explores her body as much as he explores her mouth. Sometimes they behave horribly, being completely indulgent and spending an afternoon together in bed, fucking each other in every way they can think of and always wanting more. Other days they sneak away from the keep, chasing each other like children, and lying in the meadow to nap and kiss and make love. Before Jon she’d not known sex could be so languid, so dreamy and sweet. It makes an ache curl like smoke in her ribs.

Not everything is sex, though. She feels his need for love, how he craves affection and touching. Only her daughters are so accepting of her innocent touches, and even sometimes they push away, seeking their independence. Jon wants every touch she can give and more; there has never been a single time he did not lean into her hands or her kiss or her body. Always he wants her attention, always he welcomes her affectionate touch. Always he needs her. It's so lovely and endearing that she hates to think on what made him that way, how he hungered for love and affection and contact when he was the bastard boy of Winterfell. It fills her chest, makes her yearn to give him more than it could ever be possible for one person to give. She could touch him every second of the rest of her life and still it wouldn't be enough.

Dacey knows almost immediately when she gets pregnant. After Rhella, she’d had no morning illness to warn her, but she’d learned her body with Doro, Corliss, and Margane, and she knows without a doubt that she carries a babe now; it’s in the quickness of both temper and tears, her heightened response to Jon’s touch. And more, it’s in a feeling she has, the sure knowledge that she carried another child. Jon’s child.

She says nothing for a handful of moons. She’s lost pregnancies before, and others she’s prevented from taking root for one reason or another. She could not subject Jon to such a loss before she’s sure; not if she’ll keep the baby – that had been decided the moment she knew she was pregnant – but only until she knows the babe will grow and thrive. It’s easy enough to wear loose vests and heavier tunics, concealing the still minute changes in her body that, Jon’s appreciation of the sensitivity of her teats notwithstanding, none could notice but her.

None but her, that is, and her mother.

“When were you going to tell me of your pregnancy?” Maege says one afternoon as Dacey’s helping her outside to sit in the sun and breathe fresh air. Maege’s eyes are bright and alert but she’s still brittle and far too thin, her grip on Dacey’s arm heartbreakingly fierce as she fights to walk steadily under her own power.

Dacey smiles at the question. She never could keep anything from her mother. “When I was sure the babe would take,” she says.

“You’re far enough along if I can tell,” Maege says. She lowers herself slowly into a chair set out in the garden for her, near the cold frames so that they’ll shield her from the coldest winds off the sea. She looks up at Dacey and must read some hesitation on her face, for she continues, shrewdly guessing, “Of course, you may have other reasons.”

Dacey gives a rueful laugh. Her decision to keep the babe was instant and unreserved – her girls are growing bigger and taller every day, sprouting up like weeds, and she’s missed the sweet, slight weight of a babe nestled against her, content and complete with her whole world consisting of only Dacey’s arms. But that does not make having the babe any less complicated.

“Is it Jon you worry about, or Robb?” Maege asks, cutting to the heart of it like a blade slicing through gristle.

“Both,” Dacey admits. She has tried not to think of the questions, the conflicts, the hurt that could come from something that should only be joyful. A child might make the rift between brothers permanent. She worries that with a child of his own, Jon might cease treating her daughters as if they’re as good as his. She worries that a child with Jon is the surest way there is of making Robb’s abandonment real and irreversible.

Maege reaches out and snags Dacey’s hand, holding it in a surprisingly strong grip. It reminds Dacey of the woman her mother used to be, and she feels a surge of hope as she squeezes back, holding tight to her mother’s hand.

“It will work itself out, cub,” Maege says, giving her hand a bit of a shake. “Things always do.”

The words are wise and true. But still Dacey waits, still she keeps her tongue, telling herself that she’ll wait for the right moment, though she’s no idea what the right moment might be.

*****

The morning of Jon’s nameday dawns misty and dim. Dacey stretches and yawns, propping herself up on one elbow to squint into the murky light filtering through the windows. Jon sleeps soundly beside her, though he usually wakes as early as she, if not earlier. She thinks it maybe the gloomy morning and gives him a prod, singsonging his name.

“Mmph,” he offers in return, pulling her close with the arm he has over her waist and snuggling deeper into the furs.

“Jon,” she laughs. “Wake up. How am I to give you your gift if you’re asleep?”

“Gift,” comes the mumbled response, more of an echo than a question.

“For your nameday.” His first year here, he’d told no one of his nameday, and it had come and gone with no notice. Dacey had only learned of it months later, with a pang of guilt when she realized his nameday had been like any other day, nothing special to mark the occasion. This year she’s determined that it won’t happen again.

“Mm,” he rumbles, but he makes no move to open his eyes, his body loose and warm, no sign of wakefulness.

“Your gift is sex,” Dacey tells him, nuzzling his cheek.

“Sex,” he mumbles in another echo that trails away into something sounding suspiciously like a snore. Dacey laughs, looking at his face from so close she can barely see it. He always looks so soft and sweet when he sleeps, his pink lips slack, his hair a shaggy tumble over the pillow. When she puts her palm to his cheek, he makes a low sound, turning his face instinctively into her touch. It makes her feel impossibly tender towards him. Well, awake or not, she’s a gift to give and she thinks he’ll not object, so she urges him gently to his back.

He doesn’t wake when she begins to touch her lips to his chest and shoulders, peppering him with kisses; he only stretches beneath her with a pleased sigh, opening himself to her exploration and spreading his thighs automatically so she can fit her hips between them. His body is as familiar to her as her own by now. Each spur of bone and swell of muscle, every freckle and mole and scar. She kisses all of them, ducking her head under the furs to count each rib and turn her face from side to side to rub her cheeks over his stomach, to run her tongue over the coarse hair below his navel on her way to his already-hard cock where it waits for her.

The taste of him is earthy and musky, he is solid and warm on her tongue. Dacey can feel his pulse quickening under her thumbs at the thin skin where thigh creases into hip. The furs form a cocoon about her as she sucks at his cock, fists one hand around the base to meet her lips, sliding it up when she retreats to lick at the head before sucking him into her mouth again. Even under the furs, she can hear his soft moans and whimpers; they vibrate through his body into hers, set her ringing like a sword when it's been struck. When she feels tension gathering in his thighs, she drops her head down as low as she can manage, hollows her cheeks and sucks with insistent pressure until she feels him begin to spend in hot pulses against the back of her throat and she swallows it down, milks it from him with her tongue and hand. He doesn’t shout with his release, or cry out; he only sighs, low and long, a sound of such profound pleasure and contentment that it makes her fiercely glad of having given such a thing to him. He gives her so much, and she never feels able to repay him.

He’s awake now, she can tell. He shakes as she licks his softening cock clean, presses open-mouthed kisses to his belly and along the jut of his hipbones, still wanting to touch him though he’s done. The furs rustle and she peeks up to see him raising them over his chest, peering down at her with an expression of stunned, sleepy bliss.

“So it wasn’t a dream,” he murmurs.

“Good nameday to you,” she grins. Understanding reads on his face, then a pained look, but the sort of pained that she knows is the good sort for him, the sort that means she’s gotten him in his heart.

“Dacey, come up here,” he says, soft and inviting. She acquiesces, crawling up his chest to poke her head from beneath the furs into the cool air. He kisses her before she can even finish taking a deep breath, licking over her lips and chasing the taste of himself into the furthermost corners of her mouth. “You did this for my nameday?” he asks between kisses.

“Of course,” she answers. His curls are soft and cool between her fingers as she strokes through them. “Shouldn’t I have?”

“No, it’s just…that is, I haven’t…” He pulls back from her, a ghost of a frown lingering on his brow. “No one’s ever…”

It’s unlike him to be so flustered, so at a loss for words. Dacey feels her own brow pulling into consternation as she hears the words he doesn’t say.

“You had no nameday celebrations in Winterfell?” she asks quietly. He flushes a deep, sheepish scarlet.

“Robb always remembered, of course,” he says. “And Arya. And Sansa always snuck a small gift under my pillow. But Lady Stark, she…no one was allowed to…” Dacey stills his words with her fingertips on his lips, then she replaces them with a kiss. He kisses her back with such heartfelt intensity, such soft wonder and joy that it sets an ache curling in her ribs. What an unfair world that someone as kind and tender and lovely as Jon should have been so misused for so long. If she lets it, it would eat Dacey’s insides up with anger, but there is no place for that today. Not when Dacey has a lifetime of misuse to make up for.

“Well, today won’t be what you’re accustomed to, I’m afraid,” she tells him, and then she grins. “At least not if the girls and I have anything to say about the matter.”

True enough, the girls have a pile of small presents waiting for him when he and Dacey arrive in the hall for the morning meal. They’re only simple gifts, some made by less than skillful hands – a sketch of Jon and the younger girls that Rhella had drawn in charcoal, a crude pair of gloves from Doro, a handmade book with pictures drawn by Margane in bold lines and words written by Corliss in her careful letters – but Jon handles them as if they were finely-crafted treasures, a suspicious glint in his eyes as he hauls each girl in turn into his lap to crush them with his embrace.

Dacey gives Jon his choice of activity for the day, a Mormont nameday tradition. Afternoon sees them all together at the beach, the girls swimming and splashing and chasing one another, Jon’s head pillowed on Dacey’s stomach as they lay in the sun, the warmth of it leaving them drowsy and content. Even supper is all of Jon’s favorite foods, and he is overwhelmed by it; more than once, Dacey sees him knuckling water from his eyes at a new surprise. When she presents him with a new scabbard for Longclaw, to replace the one that’s nearly worn through with age, he catches her chin and kisses her right there with the girls as witness, though they try to keep their relationship as it’s always been in front of the girls.

He is almost asleep in her arms that night when she softly says his name, nuzzling the soft hair around his ear to rouse his attention.

“Mm,” he hums in answer, sounding sleepy and content, so much so that she hesitates, but she feels it in her bones that it’s right, that she wants to tell him of his child right now, the last gift of his nameday.

“Jon,” she says. “I’ve one more gift for you.” He comes awake fully at that, lifting his head to look at her with something close to anger.

“Dacey, you’ve given me so much that I’m embarrassed. What more could I possibly want?”

She takes his hand, sets it on her abdomen, knowing the babe isn’t big enough to feel yet, but wanting him to feel it nonetheless. He goes still immediately, his eyes wide in the darkened room, glittering in the light from the banked embers of the fire. “Dacey…” he says, his voice hushed, and she smiles at him, squeezes his hand under hers.

“A daughter,” she says.

“A daughter…”

“ _Your_ daughter. Or your son.” She watches his face, wanting to see every bit of his reaction, needing to tuck it all away somewhere close to her heart. Wonder suffuses his features and he stares at her in dumb disbelief, the desire to believe her warring with caution on his face.

“Dacey, you’re…”

She nods. 

“Dacey…gods, are you… Oh gods, am I…” She laughs at the torrent of words that he can’t quite form into sentences.

“I am and you are,” she says, lifting her hands to cup his face. “You are to be a father in a few moons, Jon.”

“A father,” he whispers wonderingly. Then he kisses her lips, all over her face, drops his head to kiss her belly where it’s only just begun to round. “A father,” he says again, and she feels his tears on the back of her hand.

He falls asleep there, with his cheek pressed to her stomach, his hands curled possessively about her hips. She cards idle fingers through his hair, stroking it away from his face. She loves all of her daughters, loves them with everything she is and everything she has. But their conceptions were always tinged with sadness; as her stomach grew, so did the knowledge Dacey was bringing them into a world with a frequently absent father and more questions than she had answers. This is the first time a pregnancy has been accompanied with security and happiness, no counting of days until her child's father will leave, no fretting as to how she can possibly manage another child. This babe would be born into a world where her father stays and dotes upon her, into a world untouched by bitter duty to Winterfell and the North. It’s an irony almost cruel; this babe will have a father more loving than any could wish. It will bring Jon such joy, even as it may keep his brother away forever, never to see his own children again. Her daughters have gained one father, only to lose one in turn.

On Bear Island, every child learns that the sweetest skies can bring the harshest storms, the calmest waters hide the fiercest dangers. Everything comes with a cost. That’s something Dacey has learned too well.

“Gods,” she thinks. “Let my children leave that lesson unlearned.” It is a hopelessly futile wish, but Dacey has also learned to take her comfort where she may, and she closes her eyes and lets Jon’s breathing lull her to sleep.


	4. But Then Fall Comes

The gown doesn’t fit.

Though that’s not entirely accurate, Dacey supposes; it’s only the bodice that doesn’t fit. It’s the lingering vestiges of pregnancy and wet nursing that have her wanting to burst into tears at it – indeed, it’s the lingering vestiges of pregnancy and wet nursing that have it not fitting in the first place, Aeda having just been weaned before this visit to Deepwood Motte, Dacey’s first time being parted from her since her birth. Dacey’s moods are quicker than lightning still, and she fights tears as she makes another attempt to wrestle her breasts into some semblance of propriety within the gown. 

It’s just that it’s her best gown – her only truly fine gown. If she’d had time, she might have had a new gown made, though she could have hardly afforded such an expense. But had she known Galbart would take it in his head to wed so suddenly, she could have found the coin, or at least had this gown altered to fit her properly. She gives one last tug at the edge of the bodice, but still her teats swell indecently over the cloth, threatening to spill forth if she so much as hiccoughs.

“Hopeless,” she sighs at her reflection in the looking glass.

A knock at the door distracts her from her moody contemplation. “Dace,” Jon calls. He is already dressed and ready, having changed out of his travel clothes upon their arrival and leaving her in the room that’s been given them. He had been surprised at arriving to find one room for the two of them. Dacey imagines that most of the Glovers forget she and Jon are not wed; truthfully, Dacey forgets herself at times. When they’d been shown to their chamber, she’d thought nothing of it until Jon had shuffled one foot and looked discomfited in a way only Jon can. It’s charming, really, that even after seeing every scrap of her, after having a child with her, Jon still honors some old-fashioned notion of decency and had left the room so she might dress.

“I’m clothed,” she calls to him, and the looks down at the expanse of skin above the edge of her bodice. “Almost.”

“What does that mean, almo- oh.” She looks up to see Jon standing rigid in the doorway, his hand gripping the handle tightly enough to bleed his knuckles white. He’s looking at her in that familiar way of his, the way that warms her insides and curls her toes. She remembers what Maester Gael had said early this morning before they’d set sail, that she could resume all normal activities. Her breath catches. Suddenly the inadequacy of her bodice doesn’t seem quite so dismaying.

“It’s an old gown, I know,” she says, deliberately making her voice light and even. “Do you not think it appropriate?” She looks at him with all the innocence she can muster, stopping just short of toeing the floor and twisting a lock of hair about one finger.

“Appropriate,” Jon echoes, as if he’s not even sure what the sound means. Inwardly, Dacey smiles. She’d thought to tell him this evening about Maester Gael’s words, but now she thinks she’ll find a more opportune time. The chance of teasing Jon to the edge of his control is too delicious to pass up. Though given the hot, almost befuddled look on his face at the moment, the edge of his control probably isn’t very far away.

“Mm,” she hums, “perhaps it’s not fine enough for such an occasion. Perhaps I should remove it.” She hooks one finger in her bodice and gives it a bit of a downward tug. Jon’s eyes drop to follow the movement of her hand, and his look grows hot enough to singe.

“Remove it,” Jon echoes again, a note of hope in his voice this time. His hand twitches at his side, as if he’s imagining touching her. Dacey smiles. It’s been too long since they were truly together. Robb had never been present for the birth of his daughters, nor for the months following, when Dacey would have had little interest in his attentions nor any time for them, even if her body had been ready. Jon was so thrilled with Aeda. He’d never made the slightest indication that he was impatient for Dacey’s attentions or begrudged her the time to recover, but she can see in his eyes now that he’s missed it, and _her_ , and it sets her marrow afire inside her bones. Oh, this is going to be a lovely wedding.

She moves to stand before him, close enough that each breath has her teats brushing against his chest. His eyes are a dark fire on hers and she can see him holding himself back with visible effort. The brush of her lips along his in the barest of kisses makes him jerk. 

“We’d best not be late,” she whispers, and then she sweeps past him and into the corridor, delighting in the groan that she hears before he falls into step behind her. A lovely wedding indeed.

****

It’s a generous feast, more lavish than Dacey has seen in some time. The Glovers are doing well, it seems. It gladdens Dacey’s heart; she’s known few men kinder than Galbart Glover. Had life been but a bit different, she might have well accepted his proposal of marriage. It might well be her on the floor with him now, dancing and smiling and blushing at the thought of the imminent bedding. Well. Perhaps not blushing. Dacey laughs to think of how Galbert might have been dismayed at her lack of blushes and giggles and astonishment in his marriage bed. For all that Deepwood Motte is close to Bear Island, in some ways it’s still a world apart. 

“Something pleases you?” Jon asks in her ear, his arm sliding possessively around her waist. She’s tormented him somewhat tonight, dancing with every lord and holder, laughing gaily at their jokes and making no effort to tug the bodice of her gown into respectability. With each dance, Jon had watched her with more jealousy – a good-natured jealousy, to be sure, but jealousy nonetheless.

“A great many things please me,” she says, putting a cat-like purr into her voice. “As you well know.”

“Gods, you are trying to kill me,” he groans, and she grins in delight.

“I am. Is it working?”

“Far too well. Come, let’s dance before you melt me entirely.” He guides her out on to the floor, both of them lining up with other couples for an old-fashioned dance that Dacey learned when she was but a girl, Maege and Jorah pushing aside the tables in the Hall and teaching Dacey and her sisters the steps. Jon must have some similar experience, for he takes the steps automatically, though with a certain lack of grace. Dacey hides her smile. Strange that a lack of skill should seem so endearing. They weave among the other couples, coming together and moving away with the rhythm of the music. When they come together again, she lays her hand on his forearm, allowing him to guide her in the steps of the dance. His muscles tense under her hand, as if even her slightest touch affects him.

“How carefully you watched as I danced with Ben Branch,” she says. “One might think you were jealous.” She drags a fingertip over the inside of his wrist as they move apart, delighting in it when his eyes drift closed and he shudders before turning away to his new partner.

“You can be smug as a cat sometimes,” he says to her when they move to each other again, his hand entirely too low on her back for a formal dance.

“Do you mislike it?”

“Gods, no.”

They draw close again, her hand light in his as they walk together, a pair of dancers before them and a pair behind. When they’re near the end of the line, where they must split and walk back alongside those still behind them, she leans close, pitching her voice so only he can hear.

“Maester Gael says I may fuck you now.” She has the distinct pleasure of watching him falter and stop completely before remembering himself and following the steps that he should as they part and walk back down the column of dancers. She can see him giving her long, hot looks over the couples who pass between them, his body held in quivering alertness, like Ghost’s when he’s awaiting permission to hunt. When they come together again at the end of the line, his hand is possessive on her hip, holding her closer than is proper.

“Are you ready?” he asks in a low voice. “That is, do you want to…?” He trails off, his voice kicking up into a question. It takes her a moment to realize what he asks, but when she does, she’s not sure whether to laugh or kiss him senseless. Most men she’s known would not hesitate in such a situation but for a lack of desire, and she can see clearly that Jon suffers no lack of desire. She’s lived with him as if married for moon after moon, yet his kindness and care can still surprise and delight her. 

She looks straight at him and puts all the fire she feels into her voice. “I want you to fuck me until I cannot walk or remember my name,” she says. The sound he makes is desperate, animal. It draws the attention of those nearest them, and they look curiously at Jon, wondering if something is amiss. It amuses Dacey greatly, but it’s just as well when the dance comes to an end and the dancers mill apart with polite applause. She thinks Jon might cause quite a scandal if she pushes him any further. But she can feel his eyes on her when Lord Forrester asks her to dance, and she thinks it is only ingrained civility that keeps Jon from crossing the floor to throw her over his shoulder and take her to bed.

“Your husband does not seem as if he enjoys sharing you,” Lord Forrester says as she dances with him. There’s a note of amusement in his voice. She has known him since she was a girl and he seemed old even then. She’s sure he thinks them impossibly young now, restless and heedless.

“No,” Dacey grins, “he does not. Lovely, isn’t it?”

It’s only after Lord Forrester has bowed his thanks to her and she’s accepted the offer of a dance from another that she realizes he’d called Jon her husband and she hadn’t thought to correct him.

Jon barely manages to wait until the bedding. The guests are laughing and shouting, surrounding Galbart and his bride to strip them bare and take them to the bedding chamber, when Jon pulls Dacey from the Great Hall into a shadowy corridor, pushing her up against the rough-hewn planks of the wall and capturing her mouth with a barely-leashed hunger. She meets his hunger with her own, twining her arms about his neck and opening her mouth to his, parting her thighs for the press of his own. Distantly, she hears the clamor of the bedding ceremony, though it must compete with the rush of blood in her ears, the uneven saw of their combined breathing, the soft and wet sounds of Jon’s mouth as he tastes every crevice of her own. She smiles when he pulls his mouth away to taste her jaw, her neck, her collarbones.

“For Nella’s sake, I hope Galbart is as good at this as you are,” she manages, then gasps when he nips at her collarbone with blunt teeth.

“Galbart wishes,” Jon says, and it’s so uncharacteristically arrogant coming from Jon that Dacey cannot stop her laughter, even as he buries his face between her teats and then drops to his knees and flips her skirts over his head to tongue at her through her smallclothes and make her own knees turn to water. She’s still laughing when she comes, clutching at his head where it’s buried beneath her skirts. She supposed she should be embarrassed at how little time it takes for him to make her peak, but such feelings seem pointless in light of the magic his mouth is bringing.

They somehow make it back to their room, stumbling and giggling as if drunk, though they had little during the feast. Surely she’ll have bruises on her shoulder blades and hips on the morrow from how often they collide with the walls around them as Jon kisses her as if he’ll perish if he doesn’t, her own taste faint on his lips. Their room is warm and cozy when they finally reach it, some unseen maid having laid a fire in their absence. They take the time only to fasten the door’s latch before they move together to the bed and collapse upon it with Dacey half sprawled atop Jon’s chest. She sits up, laughing when she realizes he’s hidden beneath the yards of her skirts. Smiling, she shifts to straddle him and corrals the fabric, pulling it away until she can see his face, flushed and happy, his eyes dark and unfocused.

“You look drunk,” she tells him, smiling from her perch atop his belly.

“Only on you,” he answers. She blushes, ridiculously. How he can still do this to her, to her heart, is a mystery. Her heart twists when she thinks that Robb could do the same. These boys of Winterfell…they could be the death of her. 

“I think it more likely wine,” she says, pushing aside any little unhappiness that could mar this evening. She plants her hands above his shoulders and looks down into his face, feeling it tug between her thighs when his gaze drops hungrily to her teats where they threaten to spill from her bodice and into his face.

“Nay, ‘tis only you,” he says as if under a spell. “You and your glorious teats. Gods, Dacey, but how I have missed you.” He hooks his finger in the low line of the bodice, tugs down until it pulls over the peak of one breast to let it slip free. The sound he makes is so hot and admiring that her whole body throbs in response. There is a thin red line where the too-tight edge of the bodice cut into her skin and he traces across it with a soothing touch, draws his fingertip in lazy circles over her nipple before rolling it between two fingers to make her gasp. She’s far more sensitive than usual, and she feels on the verge of another release just from this one small touch. He tugs her bodice down at the other side, tucking it beneath both breasts so that it squeezes them up, makes them spill indecently over the fabric. Jon’s face takes on a reverent haziness.

“You’ve the most beautiful teats I’ve ever seen, Dacey,” he says, husky and low, almost in worship. “So fat and soft and pale, so sweet. I’ve dreamt of them.” 

“You have not,” she says on a laugh that turns into a gasp when he levers up off the bed and nuzzles into the dip between them, turning his face from side to side to lick and nip at her, to press hot, suckling kisses over both breasts until she’s panting and squirming with his beard a tickling scrape over her skin. 

“Oh, but I have,” he murmurs against her. “Constantly. It’s amazing I’ve managed to sleep since Aeda was born for how I’ve dreamt of your teats.” Dacey knows he teases her, but that he speaks some degree of truth as well. She lowers herself to lie atop him, her breasts covering his face, and she can’t help but laugh when he gives the happiest, most adoring groan and slides his arms behind her back to hold her there. 

“You’ll not be sleeping tonight, I don’t imagine,” she says. She punctuates her words by pushing her hips back, rubbing over him where she can feel him hard and ready, humping him through their clothing like they’re both green striplings, only just exploring the mysteries of coupling. He cants his hips up against hers, then catches the peak of her breast in his mouth and draws on it in long pulls, making it clear he is no stripling. He groans when she pulls away, but the sound turns to appreciation when she sits back on his thighs to work her smallclothes down and toss them away. His own hands busy themselves with the laces of his breeches, until she pushes them away and finishes the job herself, freeing his cock into her hands and stroking him just how he likes.

“Are you ready?” she asks with a mischievous grin, echoing his earlier words after she’d told him of Maester Gael’s assessment.

“Gods,” he says, dropping his head back to the mattress, the tendons of his throat standing out with the tension of his body. “I think I’ve been ready for years.”

“It feels like it,” she says, giving his cock a squeeze.

“You are wicked,” he laughs. “Now stop tormenting me and let me inside you.” She’d intended to draw things out a bit more – to really have him begging – but she finds she wants him inside her as well, too much to deny either of them a second longer. Easing forward, she guides him inside her, sinks down until she sits fully on his hips. It feels almost strange, as it always does after she’s given birth, and as she lets herself adjust he watches her carefully, his hands the only indication that he’s struggling to control himself for her sake, as tight as they are on her hips. When she begins to move, his face cracks like an egg, pleasure washing over him until his eyes roll back and her name becomes a prayer on his lips.

He lasts only a little while before he jerks up into her, his hands flexing on her hips hard enough to bruise. Dacey squeezes around him, riding out his release. There’s something absurdly beautiful in the way he looks when he peaks. She doesn’t think she’ll ever see it enough. When his hands relax and he lets out the breath he’s been holding, she leans forward to lie on his chest, propping her chin on her forearm.

“Is that all?” she asks. “You disappoint me, Jon.” His chest shakes beneath her with his laugh, one she feels rather than hears. Then he rolls her over, flipping her skirts up to her waist in one smooth movement.

“We’ll see if you’re still disappointed when I’m through with you,” he says. He nips at the skin above her house, and she shifts her knees apart, allowing him to settle between them. She has a feeling he’ll be spending a lot of his time there for the foreseeable future.

“Do your worst,” she tells him with a grin.

****

Aeda’s second nameday has just passed when the raven comes bearing word from Winterfell. At first Dacey thinks little of it – messages from Winterfell are frequent, bearing news of the Kingdom, royal mandates, all manner of content – but then she notices it is addressed only to her rather than House Mormont, and moreover, she realizes that it is Robb’s own hand that penned her name.

It burns like a brand in her pocket until she is alone to read it. It’s an unremarkable letter of only a few sentences. _Dacey_ , it says. _I will be visiting Bear Island with the new moon. I come on somewhat official business, but I hope for your welcome nonetheless. Robb.”_

For the space of an hour she can only think on those few sentences. She could not begin to guess at the tone; each explanation she imagines only confuses her more and leads to more questions. The letter may as well have come from a stranger for how unfamiliar it is, for how little she understands its motivation. Something in her wants to puzzle it out before sharing it with Jon, but she knows that she has no hope of solving this particular riddle, and Jon must know.

He is not anywhere she looks. Not the Hall, nor his solar, not in the yard with the girls or the armory. Each person she asks tells her only that they’ve not seen him for at least an hour. It suddenly seems to Dacey that he’s been a constant presence at her side for longer than she can count, but now that she needs him he’s nowhere to be found. It seems a sick sort of symbolism, given the letter in her pocket, the letter that suddenly seems to have the power to upend all of their lives.

She finally finds him in their chambers, which she now thinks is probably the first place she should have looked. He’s taken to napping with Aeda in the afternoons and that’s precisely what he’s doing, their daughter lying in a contented curl on his chest, rising and falling with his breath. Dacey stands and watches them for a long moment. They’ve all just begun to adjust to this new family, to a man who would not leave. Robb’s message has ice settling in her gut at how it might change everything.

Jon does not wake when she sets her hip on the edge of the mattress. Aeda is him in miniature – minus his beard and scars, of course. She takes two breaths for each of his one, as if she is truly Jon halved. Robb had missed this with his daughters. Dacey does not know whether to pity him for it or to hate him, or to hate the whole world.

“Dace?” Jon asks, blinking half awake and catching sight of her beside him. 

“You’ll spoil her,” she says, giving him a warm smile to cut the words. “She’ll refuse to sleep in her own bed before long.” She reaches out to touch her daughter’s cheek, pushing her dark hair back with gentle fingers. Aeda doesn’t stir; she’s been a heavy sleeper since near birth, something Dacey thinks has Jon the one being spoiled.

“Give me my vices,” he answers with a smile of his own, one so soft and sweet that it makes her breath catch in her throat. He sees something in her face and his own changes, growing concerned as he reaches out to touch her arm. “Something troubles you,” he says.

She does not wish to tell him, even though that’s precisely what she sought him out to do. It seems as if telling him will put something in motion beyond her power to stop it. But she knows that’s a fancy; life happens as it will, and Dacey has no more say-so in the matter now than she ever has.

“Robb sent a raven. He’ll come to Bear Island with the next new moon.”

Jon stiffens visibly, enough to make Aeda stir and murmur in her sleep. “Does he say why?” Dacey shakes her head.

“No. Only that he is on ‘somewhat official’ business.” Jon’s face grows darker at that, his brow twisting into a frown. She can see he is considering the same meaning to such words as she had before. But then he schools his features into an expression that’s placid, if somewhat forced.

“I’m sure it’s nothing.”

“You think the King in the North takes a long journey for nothing?” she asks. Jon’s face remains set, stubborn. “And if he asks you to return with him?”

“Dacey…” Jon starts, but Dacey stops him with a gesture.

“He is your King.”

“Yes,” Jon says softly. “And I am your…” His words trail off. There is no word for what they are to each other, Jon and Dacey, at least no word that the rest of the world knows.

“Yes. You are my…” Dacey mimics his words in barely more than a whisper. It is too much for her to take right now. She stands, ignoring his hand as he reaches for her, allowing briskness to cover over the emotions she does not wish to feel. “Supper soon. Don’t let her sleep too long.” Jon nods, dropping his hand. There is sad acceptance on his face, and understanding. She wishes he did not understand her so well. It only makes everything all the harder.

****

The day Robb arrives is familiar yet all wrong. He’s come to them on the tide a dozen times before at least, but always he came to meet a daughter of his own. Now it is Jon’s daughter who’ll wait on the dock, held in her father’s arms. Dacey half wants to run back to the keep and hide beneath the furs on her bed until everything is clear and certain and she does not have this pernicious feeling that she could lose so much, this sense of horrible headlong momentum that carries her forward more quickly than she can handle. But she is a Mormont. She’ll stand her ground.

It reminds her of the first time he came to Bear Island for how stiff and stilted it is. Ghost and Grey Wind fairly bristle with nervous energy, stalking around each other and sniffing suspiciously at one another’s muzzles. Not one of them seems to know what to say or how to behave, even down to the girls, who cluster together and watch quietly with large eyes. There was once a time they would have climbed his legs as if he were a tree, inserting themselves into his arms and jabbering about all that had happened since he’d last come. Even Doro hangs back now – Doro, who has missed Robb the most – hanging back beside Rhella and looking between them all with darting eyes. Dacey cannot bear her daughters so unsure at the sight of their father, so she smiles warmly and reaches out to clasp his forearm.

“Welcome back,” she says. Her words seem to thaw the girls; Doro shyly steps to Robb’s side, a delighted grin breaking across her face when he sweeps her up into his arms. Corliss and Margane crowd him as well, Corliss remembering Robb and Margane not seeming to realize who he is but wanting to be included, perpetually the little sister. Only Rhella holds back – oh, Rhella always holds back, and it hurts Dacey’s heart – hovering at Jon’s side with a protective air. It does not seem to be lost on Robb; a flicker of some unnameable emotion crosses his face before he shakes it away, devoting his attention to Doro and her happy chattering.

“And this is your daughter,” he says quietly, once Doro has wound down and he is standing before Jon.

“Aeda,” Jon supplies, just as quietly. Aeda looks at Robb curiously, returning his smile with a shy one of her own.

“I could be looking at Arya,” Robb says. “There is no doubt she is a Stark.”

“Mormont,” Rhella says, the first words she’s spoken since Robb arrived. “She is a Mormont.” There is a fierce challenge in her voice. It leeches the warmth that had only just begun to collect between them all, leaving Corliss and Margane to shift uncomfortably as Doro merely glares at her sister. 

“Rhella,” Dacey barks sharply. Still Rhella looks at Robb in a naked challenge. It is Robb who backs down.

“Aye,” he says. “And a fine Mormont lady she is.” Rhella gives a tiny nod, as if satisfied. The look on Robb’s face is amusement mixed with disbelief, as if he’s unused to such shows of defiance and cannot help but admire them. Although she knows she shouldn’t be, Dacey is proud of her daughter, proud of her fierceness and her refusal to give in.

“There’s a meal awaiting us,” Dacey says, gesturing towards the keep. “You can tell us what brings you here.” Robb shifts on his feet, his eyes dropping away from Dacey’s gaze. All of the icy worry that gripped her when she first read his letter comes rushing back.

“Time enough for that,” he says. “Time enough.” It does nothing to ease her nerves.

Tension sits over everything the entire day, seeping into Dacey’s skin like a cold mist. They could all be strangers, she and Jon and Robb, for how politely they speak to one another, how carefully they hold themselves. Robb sits stiff at the table through the midday meal, speaking with more casual warmth to the maid serving them than he does to his own brother. Dacey is unsure what it is between them: anger, it seems. Regret. Resentment. A longing for days past. She snorts inwardly and shakes her head at her romantic fancy. Perhaps it is only hunger.

It seems to affect everyone. Near supper Lyra comes to fetch Dacey, telling her only that Rhella and Doro are fighting in the yard. Dacey expects an argument, or one of their scuffles, something that happens with enough regularity to be almost commonplace. Instead she finds them truly fighting, tangled together in a seething ball of limbs in the dust, the sound of fists and slaps mingled with their snarls and grunts of pain. Ghost and Grey Wind dance in agitation around them, Grey Wind barking, both animals whining and snapping in distress.

“Girls!” Dacey barks, astonished. The note of warning in her voice is one they would normally heed in a blink, but they don’t even seem to hear her now. The ferocity of their fighting chills her to the bone. Jon is there by the time she manages to catch an arm – Doro’s – and he helps her haul them apart, holding Rhella to his chest as she struggles silently, her face a mask of anger. Dacey imagines Doro looks the same as she fights Dacey’s hold. Robb steps between them, breaking the contact of their angry glares, and Dacey feels the fight go out of Doro all at once; her daughter sags in her arms, so that Dacey must hold her up. Meeting Jon’s eyes, she exchanges a nod with him. He’ll speak to Rhella. Doro will be her problem to puzzle out.

She takes her to Doro’s favorite place, a little glade in the godswood that’s alive with painted moths. Their wings flutter through the sunlight that filters through the trees. The light is golden and rich, the kind of light that comes at the end of things. Summer is dying. Soon it will be fall, the first fall her daughters have known in their lives. Dacey waits, letting the silence thicken until Doro is ready to speak. Motherhood has been an exercise in waiting, it seems.

“Rhella wants father to leave,” she says finally, her voice sounding small and young.

“I don’t think that’s true,” Dacey says gently.

“She does, she wants him to leave,” Doro says more firmly. “She said so.”

“Did she say why?”

“She’s afraid he’ll take Jon away.”

“I see,” Dacey says, feeling an ache in her heart for her daughters. “Is that why you fought?” Doro nods, sniffling a bit.

“I don’t want Jon to leave,” she says. “Only…”

“Only?”

“Maybe father would come back and visit us again if Jon weren’t here.” Doro’s face screws up with guilt immediately, the tears that have threatened overflowing to slip down her cheeks and collect under her chin. “Why can’t I just have two fathers? Then no one would leave and we could all stay here together.”

“Oh Doro,” Dacey sighs. “Your father couldn’t stay here even if Jon were gone, you know that. You remember, he’s a King and his duties lie elsewhere. Do you remember that?”

“Yes,” Doro sniffles. “But he could still come visit.”

“He could,” Dacey agrees. She wonders what will happen now, whether Robb will return as he once did, or whether that balance has been broken permanently. It strikes her again how little she can do to protect her daughters from what would hurt them. Particularly when it is her own actions that seem to have turned into their pain.

“I’d still like two fathers,” Doro says, her words plaintive, and Dacey cannot stop her smile.

“That would make you a lucky girl indeed,” she says, squeezing Doro to her side. Doro leans her head on Dacey’s shoulder, feeling heavier than any young girl should.

“If father takes Jon back to Winterfell I won’t have any father at all.”

“Sweetling,” Dacey says, catching Doro’s chin in her hand and tilting it up so that Doro meets her eyes. “They will be your fathers no matter how far they are from you.” Doro’s bottom lip trembles, but she nods.

“I know,” Doro says with a small sigh. “But I want them here.”

“I know, pet,” Dacey says with a sigh to match. “I wouldn’t mind that myself.”

****

Robb comes to her chambers that night. She is there alone – somehow it had felt wrong for Jon to share her bed with Robb here, a feeling Jon seemed to share. He is in his old chambers now, far across the keep. It’s far lonelier than Dacey expected. When the knock sounds on her door, she thinks it is perhaps Jon reconsidering the distance, but it is Robb who stands on her threshold, a skin of wine in one hand and two glasses in the other.

“Courage,” he says, holding the skin aloft, his face almost apologetic. She can tell by the flush on his cheeks that he’s already had more than one glass. It’s strange to see him so unsure. It reminds her of the boy he was when she first met him, the boy she fell in love with despite herself. But even the boy he was never lacked for courage. She’s been happy with Jon, but she cannot deny that she’s missed Robb, sometimes with an ache so keen as to be painful.

“To your health,” she says as he fills her a glass, holding it aloft before swallowing a good half of it in three gulps. Robb gives her a rueful smile. She has a feeling he’d done the same earlier. It’s been that sort of day. For some time they only sit together and drink, feeling more like strangers than Dacey thinks they ever have. But then he looks at her, and she can see his heart in his eyes, and he’s the same boy she always knew.

“They’re so big,” he says. “The girls. They’ve gotten so big since I saw them last.”

“That tends to happen with children,” Dacey says drily, leavening the words with a smile. “They grow.”

“She was pregnant,” Robb says, and for a long moment, Dacey is confused at the sudden change of subject. “Roslin. She was pregnant just before your letter came, the letter about your mother. But she’d lost the babe and I could not leave her so I sent Jon.” He meets her eyes then, his own glassy with wine and remembered pain. “He didn’t know. About the babe. But that didn’t make it hurt less when I his raven came telling me of what had happened with you.” Dacey says nothing; there seems to be little she _could_ say. “I should not have stayed away so long, but I was so angry at first. At him, at you, at everything. And then he sent me a letter. It must have been just when your girl was born.”

Dacey struggles to comprehend all he says, to absorb it all. The words have tumbled out of him so quickly, as if he’s afraid to speak too slowly lest he never say it all. “What did it say?” she asks.

“He urged me to come back. He said I shouldn’t miss my daughters’ lives for being angry at him.” It’s a surprise to Dacey to hear such a thing. She’d no idea Jon had sent such a letter, that he’d wanted Robb to return.

“But you were still angry,” Dacey ventures cautiously.

Robb laughs at that, a bitter sound. No, not bitter: regretful. Painful. “I’d left my anger, I think. But I’d never seen him so happy in all my life as he seemed in that letter. I think perhaps I did not wish to ruin it.” He laughs again, and it’s closer to bitter this time. “Though it seems I only ruined other things by staying away.” His face grows troubled. Dacey knows he’s thinking on Rhella and Doro’s fight. He’d seemed so shocked to see it. The girls were too young for such fighting when he was last here; he’s forgotten that the girls of Bear Island aren’t so different from the boys, it seems. “I caused it, didn’t I? By coming, by upsetting everything.”

“They’ll be fine,” Dacey says rather than giving him a true answer. “This is not the first time they’ve fought, nor will it be the last.”

“I’m afraid that’s truer than you think,” Robb says on a sigh, and Dacey can see it in his face then, can see the future writ so plainly she might as well be reading a book.

“You plan to ask him to return with you,” she says, and her voice is curiously flat, no question or inflection in the words.

“There is unrest everywhere, it seems. Daenerys Targaryen continues to agitate in Essos, and now some boy claiming to be Rhaegar Targaryen’s son has surfaced to create havoc on the eastern coast. People are restless. The balance of our kingdom is far more fragile than I’d like.” It’s not truly an answer to her question, but Dacey knows Robb well enough to hear it for the answer that it is.

“I need him, Dacey,” Robb whispers, and there’s enough apology in it to seem strange. He is her King. He should make no such apology. Yet still she wants to ask, what of my daughters who need him? What of myself? What of us?

But she can’t voice such questions. She never could. She knew that going in.

****

The days pass without event after that. Summer flees swiftly in the face of encroaching fall, the leaves turning in the space of a week, seemingly all at once, though Dacey knows the change has been building for some time. Everything is changing, it seems. Dying. It’s so sudden she barely has time feel sad. Barely.

Each day Jon and Robb walk together, only the brothers and their wolves, ranging along the coast near the keep. Some days they come back looking angry and flushed, barely glancing at each other as they part in the yard. Some days they return seeming almost happy. Dacey leaves them to resolve their issues. She knows from having sisters, and from having children, that there are some places she doesn’t belong.

She doesn’t know if Robb has asked Jon to return with him yet. She doesn’t wish to ask. As long as she doesn’t ask, all can go on as normal, everything can stay and not die. He has stayed in his chambers across the keep for the past week since Robb’s arrival. It’s as it was the first year he stayed; they manage the keep together. They care for their daughters – for they’re all his daughters after a fashion. They argue good-naturedly with Maege about equipping the garrison and accompany Robb as he travels the Island, speaking with holders and townsfolk and promising help and supplies. But still the future hangs heavy over them, making everything feel fraught. Dacey hates it. She hates every second. It’s a scab she can’t pick, a splinter she can’t work loose.

“He would stay,” Alysane says to her one afternoon as they ride together, a welcome break in routine. Dacey knows who she means, Alysane has no need to clarify. But she does, continuing, “Jon, he would stay. If you asked him.”

Dacey thinks on Jon’s duty, how it is as much a part of him as his skin. How it would be akin to flaying to force him to abandon it. He would stay if she asked, that she knows and has always known.

“That’s just why I couldn’t ask,” she tells Alysane, and then she spurs her horse back towards the keep, letting the wind in her ears drown out her thoughts.

He is asleep when she lets herself into his room that night, long after he’s retired to bed. Once he would have woken at the rattle of the latch and the thump of the door as she closes it, but that was before Aeda, before sleep became a luxury to be taken gratefully. Now Jon doesn’t wake until she’s tugged her nightshift over her head and slipped beneath the furs with him, his body warm against her bare skin. He reaches for her still half-asleep, wraps both arms around her to pull her close as he murmurs her name, the sound of it seeming to bring him fully awake.

“You’re not a dream,” he says, searching her face in the dim light. Part of Dacey wishes to make it into a jape, but her heart won’t allow it. Instead she kisses him, stealing her tongue between his lips to taste the mouth that’s grown so familiar to her, and he kisses her back, all thought of words forgotten. Neither speaks; they barely make any sound at all as she helps him out of his breeches and he lies atop her, burying his face in her throat as he moves inside her. Dacey thinks perhaps their throats are crowded too full, their tongues are too thick with what may come. Sex with Jon has been many things, but it’s never been so sad before.

“He told you,” Jon says when they lie together afterwards, her cheek pillowed on his chest. She nods, the soft hair on his chest tickling her skin with the movement.

“And you’ll go,” Dacey says, not wanting the words to be a question though that is how they sound to her own ears.

“He is my King,” Jon says, words her herself said to him little more than a week ago.

“And I am your…” It takes Jon a long time to answer, long enough that Dacey thinks she could cry but for how her heart feels as if it’s carved from stone, heavy and cold in her chest.

“Yes,” he says at last, and he knows she won’t ask him to stay, she can tell. He knows why. “And you are my…” She says nothing, letting his words trail off into silence, a silence louder than all their words have been. The silence rings in her ears as she falls asleep, and stays there until morning, deafening her with all they cannot say.

****

Rhella takes the news hard. Jon takes her out riding to tell her, the two of them coming back to the keep hours later, Rhella sitting before Jon on his horse, her own trailing obediently behind. Her face is puffy, her eyes red and wet. Jon looks little different. The other girls cry, they protest and plead with both Jon and Robb to stay, but they’re mollified with promises of visits and letters, most of them still too young to understand what someone’s absence truly means. Their summers have yet to turn into fall. They’re too young to have their hearts broken by Robb sitting with them by the fire and telling them stories, absently stroking Margane’s hair and laughing with Doro and Corliss and even Rhella when she begrudges herself to join, while Jon allows Aeda to play with Ghost who submits as patiently as he has with all the other girls. None of them truly realizes that this is what their family could have been if only things were different. Even Jon and Aeda seem less like a separate family than an extension, only different pieces of what Dacey wishes she could keep.

“Aeda,” Jon says to her that night. “She won’t understand. She’ll forget me, she’ll want a father, she will-”

“She will grow up happy and healthy, loving her father dearly and anticipating his visits, same as her sisters have before her,” Dacey tells him, speaking over his worried torrent of words. He looks at her, his face wrenching in its resignation.

“And her mother?” he asks. Dacey smiles and leans forward to kiss him, ignoring the razor-sharp pain in her heart.

“Her mother is long grown,” she says.

****

The goodbyes are far more painful than Dacey had imagined they could be. She’d decided that the girls should say goodbye at the keep, that it would be easiest. The idea that she’d thought any of this could be easy mocks her now. It is all she can do not to throw herself upon them, Jon and Robb both, and beg them to stay. 

“We’ll send her to you sometime,” Maege tells Jon, holding his face in both hands like he’s her own son. “I’ll take my granddaughters to see where their fathers live.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” Jon laughs, shifting Aeda out of the way so he may embrace Maege and press a fond kiss to her cheek. Aeda has not been out of his arms the whole of the day, though Dacey knows it’s harder on Jon than it is on her daughter, who has no concept of leaving. It’s a concept Dacey would give anything to keep her from learning, but as she’s learned herself time and again, there’s little she can do to protect her daughters from life.

Each girl must be pried from them, Alysane and Lyra pulling the younger girls away, Maege taking Aeda from an unwilling Jon’s arms and giving him a smile of fond sympathy. Rhella moves to follow them as they leave the yard but Dacey stays her with a hand on her shoulder. 

“Will you see them off at the dock with me?” she asks, and Rhella gives her a smile, nodding. She holds Dacey’s hand all the way to the dock, her own hand so much bigger than it seems to Dacey it should be, but still so small.

Rhella’s hugs are fierce when it finally comes time for Robb and Jon to board the ship, first for Grey Wind and Ghost, then a long embrace for Jon, and then, after the smallest hesitation, one for Robb. It surprises him, Dacey can see, and he wraps her in hesitant arms, lifting her off her feet when she doesn’t flinch away. She stands at Jon’s side and watches her oldest hug her father and thinks that although life is often so much bad, her girls are only good. She finds Jon’s hand with her own and squeezes it.

“Dacey,” Robb says when he’s set Rhella on her feet once more. He reaches out his hand and she takes it with her free one, the three of the linked by touch as they are by their children. Impulsively, she tilts her chin and kisses him, a kiss for the father of her children. For her friend and the man she’s loved and still does.

“Gods keep you, Robb.” His smile is sad and kind and regretful. 

“And you,” he says. He squeezes her hand once and then releases her, stepping back and whistling to Grey Wind to follow him aboard. Dacey turns to Jon, her other hand still in his.

“Travel well,” she tells him. Her kiss is only a fraction of what she would tell him if she could. Only a fraction of what she feels. 

“I leave my love here with you, not just my daughter,” he tells her, looking almost nervous as he says the words. She smiles, even as it wrenches her heart. How she wishes she could ask him to stay! But she only kisses him again, quickly this time, and squeezes his hand once more before letting him go.

“I shall see you soon,” she says.

Rhella’s hand finds hers again as they watch Jon and Ghost walk up the gangplank, which is pulled quickly onto the ship behind them. Jon and Robb stand together at the rail, watching them in return, paying no mind to the deckhands who move about the ship like mice, pulling at the rigging, loosing the sails until they catch and billow in the wind. Dacey and Rhella stand together and watch as the ship pulls away, until they can no longer see Jon and Robb on the deck, and then until they can no longer see the ship at all. And then they stand a bit longer. 

Finally the bracing cold of the air penetrates Dacey’s trance. She gathers Rhella to her, pulling her back against Dacey’s stomach. She’s getting so tall. Soon she’ll be up to Dacey’s shoulders, then her chin, then she’ll look Dacey in the eye. Soon she’ll be a woman grown. But not yet. Winter is not here just yet.

“Come, cub,” she says, giving Rhella’s shoulders a fond shake. “Let’s go home.”


End file.
